There are currently two U.S. national campaigns that appear to draw legitimacy from the definition of state sovereignty traditionally understood as the exclusive right of the modern nation-state to govern people and territories, a definition harking back to the time of the Treaty of Westphalia (1713) up through most of the twentieth century. Proponents, first, for the proposed legislation to criminalize an estimated 12 million immigrants living and working in the U.S., and second, the U.S. "war on terror"—ranging from the invasion of Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq—seek to draw justification from these traditional understandings and to associate the measures with the securing of a "new world order."[1] Both efforts view the nation-state as the primary political actor on the global stage, and define the sovereignty of the nation-state in terms of its power to control its borders, as well as the populations within and outside of those borders. While this definition of sovereignty refers to a particular genealogy of academic political science, from an interdisciplinary feminist perspective, the recent fortification of the U.S.-Mexican border appears less as a rational index of a new "immigration crisis," and more an expression of a gendered transformation of the meaning of U.S. state sovereignty within the context of globalization.

The operations that have prioritized transnational markets and gendered labor supplies have challenged the traditional autonomy of the U.S. state, and rendered its coherence increasingly disaggregated; migrant flows that satisfy agribusiness and service industries simultaneously disorganize the Immigration and Naturalization Service and border patrols. In addition, as the U.S. government has withdrawn from its earlier role as the guardian of American citizens' social welfare, it has increasingly lost its former legitimacy; with this loss, the U.S. state has struggled to maintain its authority by exerting juridical or military controls, rather than by broadening its electoral base of support. In this sense, the U.S. war in Iraq has been from the outset not a political response to a traditional threat to territorial sovereignty, but the nation's attempt to occupy Iraq in order to gain political control of Middle Eastern petroleum reserves on which many industrialized nations depend; with the scarcity of oil, military occupation of the oil-rich region has been imagined as the means to control not merely the resource, but to exert influence over the most economically productive competitors in the global system, including China and India.[2] It has become clear that the Iraq war provides neither answers to waning U.S. sovereignty nor restoratives for the country's economic anxiety; to the contrary, it has increasingly turned the international public against the U.S. as it has destabilized the Middle East and incurred enormous financial debts.

In my essay, I discuss the role of U.S. political science in shaping understandings of contemporary world governance; yet the mainstream discipline's ideas of state sovereignty are incommensurable with the practices that characterize globalization, and "gender" is one significant index in which we may "read" this incommensurability. Transnational modes of gender discipline within globalization articulate the shift from the Cold War management of third world nation-states to a biopolitical governmentality focused on bodies and populations, which disrespects such borders. Not aiming to provide anything as exhaustive as a history of the field, I restrict myself to tracing how the dominant paradigm of U.S. political science has defined the study of the "political" in terms of the nation-state form, a definition that has both produced and restricted knowledge about the present conditions of globalization, and has provided the framework within which the "war on terror" and legislation of the "immigration crisis" are currently rationalized. I conclude with an examination of a cross-border feminist environmental campaign, representing a counter-politics that provides an alternative to the modern definition of sovereignty as inhering in the power of the state and its institutions.

The U.S. wars after September 2001 mark a particular stage in the global dialectic of political and economic priorities. The near unilateral militarism of the U.S. war on Iraq has been not only reminiscent of a much earlier era, but the hijacking of public fear, the enforcement of public patriotism, the breach of civil rights of prisoners held at Guantanamo—all of these measures have demonstrated a supersession of "political freedoms" of U.S. citizens by corporate interests in "free trade," or what some call "free market fundamentalism," to denote the dogmatism that fervently subordinates interests in social justice or political equality to purely economic ones.[3] More to the point, the U.S. war in Iraq militates against longer term international institutions like the United Nations, the multilateral diplomacy of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and regional interests and coalitions like the European Union (EU), which political science, over two decades ago, had argued were commensurate with the neoliberal economics of globalization. "Keeping the world safe for capitalism" had in effect already been secured by the "Washington Consensus" during the Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton presidencies in the 1980s-90s, and even officials who were inclined to expect little from international institutions had discovered their value in achieving American economic purposes.[4] Yet the global unilateralism of the U.S. invasion of Iraq not only broke with what political scientists call an "international regime"—the principles, norms, rules and governing arrangements that affect interstate interdependence—it broke with the international regime that had been in effect for at least three decades.[5] This national government has used the so-called "war on terror" to create an apparent "crisis" to justify the state's monopoly on both violence and power; it combines extreme military force in extraterritorial war with the state-supported suppressions of civil and political dissent to protect unimpeded progress of corporate capitalism.

"Small states often welcome international regimes as barriers to arbitrary abuse of power by the strong. But regimes can be equally valuable to great powers, such as the United States, that want to create, but are unable to dictate, the terms of a stable world environment," observed Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye in 1985.[6] Recalling key debates in political science will help us make sense of this contemporary contradiction in which the U.S. militarism employed to command the current global economy appears to hark back to political policies of an earlier isolationist nation. In briefly tracing the neorealist and neoliberal debates in political science, I argue that even in their disagreements, the two approaches actually confirm a normative notion of nation-state sovereignty, obscuring the effects of global governance for most of the world's population. Ultimately, I direct my discussion towards the exploration of feminist political forms that practice alternative notions of sovereignty. Where might we "read" these practices that are rendered illegible within the studies that privilege the normative politics of the western nation-state?

The liberal tradition defines sovereignty as the right of the state to exercise jurisdiction over its citizens, maintain internal order, and defend its territory.[7] Sovereignty rests on an internal principle, not on the lineage of a dynasty or aristocracy, and in the concept of the nation-state, the political sovereignty of the state is broadened through constitutional enfranchisement and legitimized through a common national culture.[8] In principle, civil society integrates national culture, economy, and social order, and the distinction between civil society and the state is crucial to the emergence of the rational public sphere in which citizens speak and debate within the rule of law.[9] Yet this principle understates the degree to which control over the means of violence has proven to be the defining characteristic of state sovereignty. Indeed, the more effectively a state monopolizes the use of force, the less frequent the state may resort to actual violence. Political science in the United States adopted this liberal definition of sovereignty, and the democratic nation-state has been presumed to be the ideal type, or the model of statehood, for participation in the international interstate system.[10] The result is that there is an underestimation of the contradictions within the nation-state, on the one hand, and between imperial nation-states and the formerly colonized world, on the other.

With respect to the contradictory inequalities within the nation, the state declares the universal extension of rights to all citizens, yet U.S. history has shown that access to rights has always been unevenly distributed, requiring social movements to call upon the state to establish liberties for subjects who are guaranteed rights in theory. Conceiving the state as grantor of rights, emancipatory and democratizing politics have often struggled to reform the state. For example, workers struggles in the 1940s, and civil rights movements for women and racialized minorities in the 1960s and 70s, are examples of popular efforts to extend equal rights and to make the state accountable for political liberties promised in theory.[11] When rights have been suspended or curtailed in times of national security—as the rights of Japanese Americans relocated to internment camps during World War II, or the rights of U.S. citizens imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay during the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—struggles for justice on behalf of those denied civil rights have addressed the state. The growth of national industries exacerbated inequalities of property and political representation, and labor movements and trade unions have called upon the state to create certain controls on the "liberties" of factory owners and corporate profits. Of course, tensions between capital and labor have grown exponentially with the neoliberal globalization of the U.S. economy. The internationalization of production not only broke links between domestic producers and domestic labor, but transnational corporate imperatives aimed at reducing labor costs drives corporations to shift production to labor markets in the poorest countries, with the lowest wages and the fewest taxes and regulations.

The focus on the nation-state as the normative political unit also leaves unstudied the historical and structural inequalities between imperial nation-states and the nations of the formerly colonized world, most of which gained independence through decolonization movements in the mid-20th century. During the centuries of European rule, colonial administrations in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean extracted profits through imposed forms of economy, politics, religion, language and culture, justifying rule through a "civilizing mission."[12] Colonialism included the capture and import of Africans for slave labor on colonial plantations, the destruction of indigenous peoples and brutal suppression of the colonized cultures, and the imposition of European education and social administration. Throughout the nineteenth century, native anti-colonial movements sought to establish self-governing nations independent of their British, French, Dutch and Spanish colonizers.[13] Anti-colonial movements in most of the former colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean articulated their independence by the mid-20th century by becoming new states on the international stage.

Newly independent nations emerging from decolonization entered a world system in which the nation-state was the normative unit of sovereignty recognized by the postwar world. Yet after the establishment of the state, the new national governments—often provisional, not yet "legitimate"—created new societies with difficulty; there were internal and external obstacles to the redistribution of sovereignty, land, and economic power necessary for actual "decolonization."[14] The period of newly emerging independent nations converged with U.S. postwar economic interests in expansion and investment abroad; U.S. "development" projects often created new dependency or reproduced old inequality for the new nations.[15] In this sense, while scholars and statesmen have tended to cast postcolonial nationhood as the vehicle for third world "progress" and entry into the modern world of nations, statehood for the formerly colonized has rarely meant actual autonomy and self-determination.[16] New postcolonial states have remained disadvantaged in the uneven distribution of both sovereignty and resources, and it is evident that what Francis Fukuyama called "the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government" has hardly taken place.[17] The United Nations, founded in 1945 when many former colonial areas were becoming independent states, has been the central institution in the conduct of international relations; yet however much the U.N. attempts to represent the larger community of nations, it has tended to be the circle of victors emerging from World War II who have held sway. The U.N. Charter framed abstract principles for international cooperation: sovereign equality, territorial integrity and political independence of states, non-intervention in internal affairs, equal rights—yet the Charter is not a constitution for international society, and it has no central authority to legislate nor does it possess the character of a government.[18] Multilateral organizations within the U.N., such as the Non-Aligned Movement in 1965, sought to address the disparity of power between states, representing those not aligned with or against the major superpowers.[19] International non-governmental organizations, or INGOs, have sponsored forceful multilateral initiatives in the areas of human rights, war crimes, world health and environmental protection.[20] Yet comparative politics and international relations have only begun to explore the range of extra-state issues that accompany globalization, such as the politics of immigration or the growth of non-governmental organizations.

Two particular "schools" for understanding international politics have presumed the ideal type of the nation-state. The "realist" school (sometimes called "neorealist" to indicate both its affinity with and distinction from earlier approaches) conceives the state as a sovereign, monolithic unit with little internal differentiation whose primary purpose is to defend the national interest; neorealists generally see, as did Thomas Hobbes, the conflicts among nations as necessarily aggressive, perpetual struggles for security and power.[21] What Hans Morgenthau called "political realism" gained particular vigor after World War II and during the Cold War, when the U.S. was engaged in a power struggle with the Soviet Union. Realism deployed the language of power and interests rather than of ideals and norms; it encompassed the propositions that states are the major actors in world affairs, that international anarchy is the principle force shaping states, that states in anarchy are predisposed toward conflict and competition, and that international institutions will only marginally affect the prospects for cooperation.[22] "The state among states... conducts its affairs in the brooding shadow of violence. Because some states may at any time use force, all states must be prepared to do so—or live at the mercy of their militarily more vigorous neighbors. Among states, the state of nature is a state of war," Kenneth Waltz wrote in 1979.[23]

The "liberal institutionalist" or "neoliberal" school challenged the realist assumption of anarchy and its utilitarian "state as actor" approach, and argued for international institutions of cooperation. If the "realist" tradition follows a particular understanding of Thomas Hobbes, the "liberal" one emerges out of the political theory of John Locke, and became embodied by Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, and Franklin Roosevelt.[24] The "neoliberal" approach emphasized its distinction from "liberalism" by integrating realism's concern with interests and power. It argues that increased global interconnection has transformed earlier meanings of state sovereignty and autonomy, and that international relations depend upon what Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye called "complex interdependence," or multiple channels and institutions of common interest and collaboration.[25] Neoliberals envision a global society that functions alongside individual states by means of regional treaties or hemispheric economic trade agreements, to institutions such as the United Nations, and to increasing numbers of international non-governmental organizations addressing issues from environmental protection to human rights to nuclear deterrence. This latter "institutionalist" approach had come to represent the mainstream analysis in the political science of international relations, in the two decades after the Cold War.[26] Since September 2001, however, the U.S. has pursued what could be termed not simply a "neorealist," but a "neoconservative" foreign policy that harks back to the political realist approach of the Cold War period. Indeed, neoconservatives argued that the U.S. should never have reduced their military power after the Cold War, and the aggressive unilateral stance in Iraq was the only way for the U.S. to recuperate its global stature.[27] Neoconservatives believe that U.S. nationalism should be vigorously institutionalized in both public and private institutions, such as in schooling and the family; they are antagonistic to international institutions, believing they undermine the authority of the U.S. state. This approach, exemplified by the "Bush Doctrine" of pre-emptive war, constitutes a radical departure from earlier U.S. foreign policy, effectively abandoning the Cold War doctrine of deterrence or even the post-Cold War notions of multipolar collaboration.[28]

Where neorealists study factors in the individual nation-state to observe actions of states to defend themselves, neoliberals study diplomatic treaties, international institutions, trade and development policies that represent common interests and cooperation. Neorealists see war as necessary in a world in which every state seeks to dominate others.[29] Neoliberals, on the other hand, contend that complex systems of "international regimes"—the norms, rules, regulations, decision-making procedures, and institutions that accompany global economic interdependence—have greatly diminished the necessity of military force; international regimes do not replace reciprocity and agreement, but work to stabilize, reinforce, and institutionalize it.[30]

It should be clear that because the two dominant schools of American political science select and value different objects and processes, and ask different research questions of those objects and processes, they have different investments in definitions of political order and political change. The implications of their approaches for political policy and action seriously differ, as well. Yet the academic "dialogue" between neorealists and neoliberals collaborates in reinscribing particular absences in political science research, just as the apparently different philosophies of Hobbes and Locke constitute together the origins of modern western political theory. Despite their apparent opposition, the two approaches share a state-level focus on international relations that refers to the liberal democratic nation-state as its normative ideal type. This focus defines "politics" in terms of states and excludes, on the one hand, the "politics" of popular social movements or workers' struggles beneath the level of the state or organizing transnationally, and on the other, communist or socialist nonwestern states like China or Cuba, or those newly independent nations in Africa, Asia or the Caribbean whose narratives of political development diverge from the "modernization" model based on states in Europe or North America. A shared definition of "politics" as the activities of states and international regimes obscures an understanding of how government, interest, and power affect the lion's share of the non-elite world. The definition of sovereignty as inhering exclusively in the nation-state itself effects a normative notion of governance that obscures other modes of rule, as well as other modes of politics that specifically counter that rule. State-centric approaches presume an isomorphism of nation-state properties and measure these increasingly standardized properties across nation-states both old and new.[31] In effect, neo-functionalist state-centrism research effectively produces the conditions for "integration" among developing countries of relatively equal size, with symmetries of trade, level of development, governing institutions and ideologies, and per capita income.[32] In a sense, most political science continues to be organized in relation to a "phantom" model of the nation-state, even when it sets out to study how global interdependence challenges or reinforces the power of the nation-state.

Political science that places nation-state sovereignty at the center of its studies has left "understudied" a broad range of phenomena, from sovereignty movements for self-determination by native indigenous peoples, to multilateral solidarities or international non-governmental organizations that have sponsored initiatives in the areas of human rights, war crimes, world health and environmental protection, to transnational extra-state activities like the so-called "anti-globalization" movement.[33] Native American, and indigenous sovereignty movements in North America, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand, are rarely studied by the mainstream discipline.[34] Political science has also consistently disregarded the Bandung conference, which in 1955 gathered a coalition of 29 states organized by Indonesia, Burma, Ceylon, India, and Pakistan, representing more than half of the world's population, promoting Afro-Asian economic and cultural cooperation and opposing colonialism or neocolonialism by the United States or the Soviet Union.[35] The Bandung conference led to the organization of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961, which joined over one hundred states not formally aligned with or against either Cold War power bloc in a "declaration on promotion of world peace and cooperation," affirming their moral and practical solidarity with one another in their pursuit of independent sovereignty, territorial integrity, economic independence, and peace within the Cold War context.[36] Opening the 1955 conference, President Sukarno of Indonesia called for an end to colonialism, not only "the classic form which we of Indonesia, and our brothers in different parts of Asia and Africa, knew," but also stressed that political economic domination by the U.S. and U.S.S.R. was "colonialism... in modern dress" and warned of war's absolute powers of destruction in an atomic age. Jawaharlal Nehru spoke about the importance for Asian and African nations to stand for peace in an era in which war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. could destroy the world. The Final Communiqué of the Conference underscored the need for developing countries to become independent from the leading industrialized nations by forging an alternative path to development, with lateral technology exchanges among one another, and the establishment of regional training and research institutes. Yet despite the powerful vision of African and Asian anti-war and anti-colonial solidarity, the Bandung conference has been virtually forgotten by 20th century political science, illegible within its normative classifications. This "forgetting" of Bandung exemplifies a persistent disinterest in the study of the formerly colonized or developing world in U.S. political science, a "blindspot" that continues to be reproduced within the discipline's concept of globalization. Neither neorealist nor neoliberal approaches make visible indigenous peoples, minority groups, women and children, and poor migrant workers beneath the level of the state, or more to the point, in neither approach are their deteriorating conditions within globalization made a priority as objects of research.

Academic disinterest in the 1955 Bandung conference is commensurate with both the powerlessness of the developing world in world governance, and the complicity of social science research in the centralization of U.S. interests. Both demonstrate the urgent need for alternative forms of study, literacy, and interpretation, including feminist paradigms for understanding the "politics" of globalized communities.[37] We must relinquish the presumption that all societies in the modern world system are organized in the same way, in order to take seriously the ample evidence that modernization has been a violently uneven process that has produced antagonisms and asymmetries in different regions and locales, and that neither exploitation, nor the emergence of political subjects and practices, can be thought of only in terms of a single uniform collectivity, teleology, or narrative of development. In other words, the practice and the terrain of the political must be redefined and imagined differently in relation to different histories of uneven material conditions.

I began my discussion by linking the neoconservative American foreign policy of the U.S. war in Iraq with the anti-immigrant fortification of the U.S-Mexican border. Mainstream ideas of nation-state sovereignty used to justify contemporary militarism in Iraq and at the border misrecognize and misrepresent the material practices of globalization, and transnational "gender" is one significant index in which we may "read" this incommensurability. Transnational gender disciplines register the shift from the Cold War management of nation-states to a biopolitical governmentality focused on bodies and populations. An interdisciplinary feminist analysis can foreground the contradiction between political isolationism and economic globalism, between manipulations of racialized gendered labor in the production of an alleged "immigration crisis" and the dependence of U.S. middle class consumer society on male migrant labor and female manufacturing labor in the export processing zones. Government-declared national "crises" appear to authorize the state's monopoly on violence, and are used to justify the disrespect of laws and liberal political bodies, and the overriding of civil rights. Recent cross-border feminist projects on the U.S.-Mexican border address these contradictions in a variety of ways: from workplace struggles, to campaigns for environmental justice, to the protection of migrant communities. These movements constitute new forms of transnational politics that establish and practice an alternative meaning of "sovereignty" in domains that the social sciences have normally bracketed as "culture." By addressing issues of life and death in the workplace, community, and border regions, these feminist movements have named the power of the state in deciding who lives and who dies; appealing to a transnational public sphere that includes both Mexicans and U.S. Americans, these cross-border movements have redefined social justice as the gendered exercise of sovereignty by the border communities themselves to end the state's arbitrary power over life. They have called for transformations in the responsibilities of states and corporations on both sides of the border toward the legal, economic, and environmental protection of border communities.

The contemporary production of an "immigration" crisis is only the most recent moment in a much longer U.S. history of peaks in anti-immigrant sentiment during periods of national insecurity: whether Chinese, Irish, Jewish, Mexican, or Russian, or even freed slaves migrating to Northern cities after the Civil War. In the last decade, Immigration and Nationality Service (INS) inspectors at checkpoints along the U.S.-Mexico border have reported increases in human trafficking and smuggling; they find people rolled inside carpets, sewn into car seats, and stuffed into washing machines. At the Tecate Port of Entry, a 5-year old girl was discovered, meticulously sealed inside a piñata.[38] Border enforcement projects, like Operation Gatekeeper, have added expensive fencing and militarized the urban border areas. Meanwhile, the Border Patrol has unearthed dozens of elaborate underground tunnels straddling the border through which migrants and goods are smuggled. Yet while the increased militarization of the border has made "illegal" crossing more difficult and treacherous, it has not reduced the numbers of people putting themselves at risk to work in the U.S. Border officials suggest that the militarization of the border has made it dangerous and even fatal for male migrants to cross back and forth, and has forced these men to work undocumented in the U.S. Women and children remain in Mexico, or pay expensive "coyotes" to smuggle them across. Yet this production of a contemporary "immigration crisis" absents the historically unequal relationship between the U.S. and Mexico, which reaches back to the conquest and war in the 19th-century, continued in the subordination and exploitation of Mexican residents in the U.S. as noncitizen workers, and is exacerbated by neoliberal globalization today.[39] The Mexican debt crisis of 1982, and Mexico's entry into the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), decisively opened the country to global economic restructuring and reconfigured many border areas as export processing zones for multinational corporations. Peso devaluation and neoliberal reforms have resulted in even more dramatic cuts in Mexican state provisions for education and health care, sending greater numbers of people into poverty. All of the human traffic at the border takes place in the context of these longstanding global inequalities.

In other words, even as global conditions disaggregate state sovereignty, the state still continues to flex its muscles to exert a role in border and immigration policies, though its power is challenged by transnational corporations, regional treaties, or supranational organizations that actually promote transnational immigration to satisfy the demand for inexpensive labor. In this sense, the U.S. targeting of "illegal immigration" must be understood as a performance of narrow government power in the face of declining state sovereignty. As Saskia Sassen observes, "the exclusivity and scope of state competence has changed, and there is a narrowing range within which the state's authority and legitimacy operates."[40] To focus on "illegal immigration" is to disavow the long, extensive relationship of conquest and exploitation between the U.S. and Mexico, which today includes enormous corporate profits both from undocumented labor in the U.S., and from the maquiladoras in Mexico. Since the 1970s, U.S. investors have profited greatly from the low cost of Mexican labor, where wages are maintained by agreements between the Mexican state, the unions, and the corporations. With the end of the Bracero Program that had supplied mostly male labor to U.S., the Mexican government established maquiladora factories at the border, employing over 850,000 workers, more than 50 percent of whom are girls. Employing mostly girls and women exploits their structural vulnerability in family and society, and deepens and reproduces patriarchal gender relations in the workplace.[41] For Mexico's centralized government and the large state-run unions who view the maquiladoras as a strategy for national development, as well as for multinational corporations who set up factories to take advantage of tax holidays and lack of labor or environmental laws, the profits are a disincentive to creating protections for the young women.

Within this context, cross-border organizing for social and environmental justice along the U.S.-Mexican border region can be understood as an international counter-politics that contests mainstream definitions of political sovereignty. In addressing the transnational conditions of globalization, in which labor exploitation is deepened and eased by product design in one location, assembly in another, marketing and sales in yet another—the innovation of cross-border organizing is that it is likewise "transnational," a "politics" not aimed exclusively at rights within the nation-state. In creating a public discourse about industrial accountability for environmental health and safety, transnational feminist advocacy networks explicitly target the Mexican and U.S. states' collusion with the industries that expose workers to lethal chemicals and pollutants, and declare that those states exploit women and children at the border, as not merely instruments of labor, but as disposable life. Cross-border organizing to counter the deadly conditions for border communities constitutes a new form of political activism in light of the declining legitimacy of both the U.S. and Mexican national governments.

A recent documentary film by Vicki Funari and Sergio De La Torre, Maquilapolis: City of Factories (2006), both exemplifies and depicts these new forms of transnational political activism. A unique collaboration between Latino filmmakers in the U.S. and women working in Mexico's maquiladoras, Maquilapolis depicts a group of women struggling for environmental justice in Tijuana, a major border site for electronics manufacturing in which over 80% of the factory workers are women migrants from southern Mexico. Multivocal and multiperspectival, the film's selection and organization of images, narrative, and sound are the result of collaborative decisions among the women. "Maquilapolis" is composed of video segments that the women themselves have filmed and narrated, in which each presents her own particular story within the history of the border's development as an export processing zone—arrivals at the border from rural Mexico, discoveries of toxic conditions in their workplace and in their colonias, decisions to take action and become promotoras, activists who educate other women in the community—these particular stories are enfolded within the growth of the maquiladora industry. The woman named Carmen begins: "My name is Carmen Durán... I have worked in nine assembly plants. I was 13 years old when I arrived in Tijuana." Another woman, Lourdes, tells the viewer she is "turning on the camera" to show us the toxic river running through her neighborhood, placing her children and neighbors at risk for leukemia, cancer, and anencephaly; speaking directly into the camera, she points to the lesions on her own body. Carmen offers a tour through her daily routine: feeding and bathing her children in their house without running water, electricity or sewage, which she built of discarded garage doors bought in the U.S.; going to work; explaining that because she is exposed to lead contamination in the factory, she cannot wash her color-coded work smock with her children's clothes. At a neighborhood meeting of women advocates, she describes her transition from being unknowingly exposed to taking action, "You're a student, and then you become a teacher." "We see things differently," says another promotora.

This transformation of perspective occurs in both aesthetic form and thematic content; the women record the shift from being objects viewed as commodified yet disposable labor, to becoming subjects who depict themselves as analysts of these conditions and as activists working against them. For example, in one segment, Carmen films Lourdes as Lourdes films the U.S. side of the border through a space in the corrugated metal wall that divides the two countries: "I'm looking at the other side of the border," her voice-over explains, "This is something new for me." "I've lived here 18 years and I've never been to it," adds Carmen. The segments, together, visually document various parts of the process through which the women—exposed to contamination in the workplace, raising their children amidst toxic pollution and waste—organize to make accountable the industries responsible for the environmental conditions causing disease and death in their communities. Contrary to state and industry discourses that represent the women workers as docile or passive, this environmental campaign is one of the many examples in which girls and women have engaged in struggles to transform the conditions in which they live and work.[42] Involved in what Melissa Wright has termed "a project of reversing the discourse of female disposability," they counter the regimes that subject their communities to death, and they refuse to be treated as less than human.[43] In the last 35 years since the maquiladoras were established, women's struggles have ranged from work stoppages on the shop floors, to organized protests against factory shutdowns and withheld severance pay, to organizing against routine sexual abuse and harassment—all indices of the multiple modes and strategies employed by girls and women at the border to counter their treatment as dispensable life.[44]

In this sense, the promotoras in Maquilapolis suggest that specifically gendered violence to life on the U.S.-Mexican border gives rise to political practices that cannot be remedied through rights-based citizenship, and whose strategies necessarily reach beyond traditional state channels.[45] The activists are mostly women who migrated from rural Mexico at a young age, with sole responsibility for raising children, without extended family support.[46] While traditional labor unions would organize around the workplace issue of wages, of greater concern for these women are the health and safety of their children with the high incidences of birth defects in polluted communities, and the vulnerability of girls and women to sexual abuse and violence.[47] The film ends with the success of a decade-long campaign, in which their Chilpancingo Collective collaborated with the San Diego Environmental Health Coalition to publicly pressure the Mexican Procuraduria Federal de Proteccion Al Ambiente (PROFEPA), and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. International media coverage created enough pressure to obligate both to a joint clean up of the lead waste in Chilpancingo. Ultimately, "Maquilapolis" depicts an alternative practice of "sovereignty" to counter state-sanctioned death in their border community. Yet Lourdes comments that with of the hundreds of polluting factories that remain, the future is uncertain.

Feminist organizing at the U.S.-Mexican border necessarily links processes and relationships that are transnational and not exclusively managed by citizenship in the nation-state; furthermore, the women who become activists and filmmakers in Maquilapolis are a nontraditional population, often unrecognized by the fields of sociology, political science, or economics. Maquilapolis is a cultural and social project in which these women—who are simultaneously workers, mothers, advocates, and teachers—are political actors addressing not only the conditions of waged labor within an individual factory, but who identify a broader frame to describe the lethal assault on life chances within globalization, both in their gendered treatment as disposable workers to be exploited and thrown away, and in the destruction of their border community environment through heedless dumping of industrial wastes. Their practices rearticulate the border as more than an export-processing zone, and name it as a dehumanized social space, a gendered necrospace, one of complex and pervasively gendered violence. The women explicitly foreground both state and capital's capacity to dictate who matters and who is dispensable, who may be used up to the point of extinction, what Achille Mbembe has termed "necropolitics."[48] Their actions aim to stop the conversion of populations of border women and children into what Giorgio Agamben calls "the new juridical category of 'life devoid of value.'"[49] In refusing to be less than human, the women contest the regime that presumes their lives to be readily available and easily dismissed. Contrary to formal exercises in political modernization that aim to universalize the ideal type of state-centered politics everywhere, collaborative projects like Maquilapolis instead constitute a transnational public sphere to address who may live and who must die within the longer history of global inequality.

Endnotes

1. While the concept of "new world order" harks back to Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations following World War I, I refer here to the more recent usage in the George H. W. Bush's September 11, 1990 speech "Toward a New World Order." Here he used it to name post-Cold War U.S.-led world political governance in which the U.S. and Russia would cooperate to contain third world instability, whether in the form of Asian economic challenges, Islamic movements, or Latin American social movements. At that time, the New York Times observed that many on the American left called "new world order" a "rationalization for imperial ambitions" in the Middle East. Many charged that it was a unipolar political vision, under the guise of multipolar collaboration. The term receded in the 1990s under the presidency of Bill Clinton, when liberal institutionalist policies were dominant. Since 2003, however, the term has recurred to name the designs of President George S. Bush's U.S.-led "war on terror." [Return to text]

2. In 1999, China lifted the prohibition on foreign-private economic cooperation. As the world's seventh largest trading country, China joined the WTO in 2001, and by 2002, China surpassed the United States as the most favored destination for foreign direct investment. Reports of U.S. trade deficits with China have grabbed headlines and fanned protectionist flames throughout the U.S. For some time, China has been extremely competitive in labor intensive manufacturing, but it has now moved ahead in sophisticated technology and innovative electronic design. The U.S. trade deficit with China is soon likely to pass $150 billion. [Return to text]

3. Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton, 2002, 12. [Return to text]

4. On the "Washington Consensus," as well as neoliberal assumptions held by the IMF, World Bank, and U.S. Treasury since the 1980s for developing countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa, see Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents; and Robert Pollin, Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity. London: Verso, 2003. [Return to text]

5. Stephen Krasner, Ed. International Regimes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983. [Return to text]

6. Keohane and Nye, Power and Interdependence. Glenview, IL.: Scott, Foresman / Little Brown, 1989, 271. [Return to text]

7. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689) wrote against the arbitrary rule of the absolute monarch, and asserted that once man accumulated property it would lead to the necessity to found a political society to protect rights to property. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social (1762) [The Social Contract], wrote that natural rights are renewed and protected when individuals agree to enter into the social contract founding a political society, organized according to the collective, rather than individual, "general will." Drawing upon these thinkers and other Enlightenment philosophers, classical liberalism stressed not only human rationality, but the importance of individual property rights, natural rights, the need for constitutional limitations on government, and, especially, freedom of the individual from external restraint. In On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill, major British theorist of political liberalism, synthesized the principles of representative government, the protection of civil liberties, and laissez-faire economics that were in force for much of the 19th century. [Return to text]

8. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. [Return to text]

9. An early crucial formulation of this notion of public reason was Immanuel Kant's famous 1784 essay, "An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?" ["Beanwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?"] In What is Enlightenment?, James Schmidt, Ed. Berkeley: California, 1996. [Return to text]

10. Max Weber's sociology is the origin of the idea of the ideal type, a heuristic proposition against which the difference, variance, or convergence of specific social and historical instances were measured, a comparative mode of study that continues to be influential in most of the modern social sciences, including political science. Weber is well-known for having observed that social behavior in modern western society of the early 20th century had come to be dominated more and more by goal-oriented rationality and instrumental reason, and less and less by traditional values and forms of sociality. This ideal-typical construction of "pure rational action" presumed the individual within the context of modern western industrial society, and measured the different degrees of rationalization as "deviations," by comparing concrete social instances to this normative regulatory type. Weber, Economy and Society: Volume I. New York: Bedminster Press, 1968 [original pub. 1922]. [Return to text]

11. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge, 1994. [Return to text]

12. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914. New York: Pantheon, 1987. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993. [Return to text]

13. On anticolonial nationalisms, see Amilcar Cabral, Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral. New York: Monthly Review, 1973; Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. Intro. Jean-Paul Sartre. New York: Grove, 1963; Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism; Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World; London: Zed, 1986; P. O. Esedebe, Pan-Africanism: The Idea and the Movement, 1776-1991. Washington, DC: Howard, 1994. [Return to text]

14. For the most lucid discussion of the challenges to decolonization after the capture of the state by the national bourgeoisie, see Frantz Fanon, Wretched. [Return to text]

15. For excellent critiques of the discourse of development and the impact of development policies in Latin America, see Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995; Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. [Return to text]

16. See Mortimer Sellers, Ed. The New World Order: Sovereignty, Human Rights, and the Self-Determination of Peoples. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1996. [Return to text]

17. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992. [Return to text]

18. Adam Roberts and Benedict Kingsbury observe that the U.N. has proven to be much more successful as an international forum for debating and declaring principles, than as a body capable and powerful enough to govern or legislate war, peace, crime, or violations of human rights. They argue that power is shifting from increasingly enmeshed states to cross-state groupings or to international institutions; territoriality is declining as a central principle of organization, but nevertheless, the state remains the principle institution for achieving domestic order, and an interstate system continues to provide the skeletal framework for international society. Adam Roberts and Benedict Kingsbury, Presiding Over a Divided World: Changing United Nations Roles, 1945-1993. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1994. [Return to text]

19. See The Non-Aligned Movement. [Return to text]

20. Since 1850, more than 25,000 non-profit, non-governmental organizations with an international focus have been established, most after World War II; roughly 6000 from 200 countries have been recognized by the Union of International Associations. Regarding issues like medical aid for the world's poor, human rights violations, women's rights, or the prevention of environmental or biological destruction, global social movements and international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), have been much more effective on these issues than either individual nation-states or the United Nations. This suggests that nation-states may not be the most appropriate site for addressing issues that are global in nature, such as violations of labor rights by transnational corporations, or the destruction of the environment by industrial wastes. See John Boli and George Thomas, "World Culture in the World Polity: A Century of International Non-Governmental Organization," American Sociological Review (April 1997); John Keane, Global Civil Society. Cambridge: Cambridge Press, 2003. [Return to text]

21. Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Hobbes are often cited as intellectual ancestors of political realism. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan [orig. pub. 1651] Oxford: Blackwell, 1967. On the legacy of Hobbes to international relations, see Robert O. Keohane, "Hobbes's Dilemma and Institutional Change in World Politics: Sovereignty in International Society," Hans-Henrik Holm and Georg Sorenson, Eds., Whose World Order?: Uneven Globalization and the End of the Cold War: Perspectives on World Politics. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995. [Return to text]

22. See Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, New York: Knopf [orig. pub. 1948] 1973. [Return to text]

23. Kenneth Waltz Theory of International Politics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979, 96. Waltz's book has been regarded as the paradigmatic work of a neorealist approach to international relations. See Robert O. Keohane, Ed. Neorealism and Its Critics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. [Return to text]

24. The "liberalism" of Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, Franklin Roosevelt, and others, justified and encouraged the first era of globalization which came to an end with World War I, the Versailles Treaty, collapse of the gold standard, and the Depression. Neoliberalism is associated with the second era of globalization, beginning after World War II with Bretton Woods, the founding of the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, and continuing today; it favors international institutions while de-emphasizing government interventions, advocating the reduction of local regulations and barriers to commerce, corporatism, and the privatization of state run enterprises. [Return to text]

25. See Keohane and Nye, Power and Interdependence; David A. Baldwin, Neorealism and Neoliberalism: The Contemporary Debate. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, 284. [Return to text]

26. See, for example, Robert O. Keohane, Joseph S. Nye, Stanley Hoffman, Eds. After the Cold War: International Institutions and State Strategies in Europe, 1989-1991. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1993. [Return to text]

27. The neoconservative position is well represented by Donald Kagan, and his sons Frederick and Robert. In While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000, Donald and Frederick Kagan draw an analogy between a post-Cold War U.S., which was vulnerable to "terrorism," and Great Britain between the two world wars; they characterize Britain as having ignored international realities and crippled itself by cutting military forces, arguing for greater military spending in the U.S. Robert Kagan argued for U.S. unilateralism in Iraq despite European opposition, see "Power and Weakness," Policy Review, 113 (June 2002) and for a position on greater military force in Iraq, "Do What It Takes in Iraq," Robert Kagan and William Kristol, Weekly Standard, Vol. 008, Issue 48 (Sept 2003).

Neoconservatives return not only to Thucydides and Hobbes, and to the anticommunist political realism of the Cold War, but also to the work of Leo Strauss. Strauss brought to American neoconservatism the ideas of Carl Schmitt, the German legal scholar and political philosopher of the 1920s and 30s, whose ideas, taken up in Germany, were largely suppressed in the U.S. due to Schmitt's Nazi association. Yet Strauss was engaged with Schmitt's thought in the 1930s and wrote the concluding notes to Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political. [orig. pub. 1932] trans. George Schwab, foreword Tracy B. Strong. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996. See Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue. Trans. J. Harvey Lomax. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995; Nicholas Xenos, "Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of the War on Terror," Telos.

Schmitt argued that the "concept of the political" is founded on the ineliminable role of power in an ongoing state of war epitomized in the distinction between "friend" and "enemy." Schmitt's vehement critique of liberalism, pluralism, and liberal process, charged that they "depoliticized," or hid, this condition. "The political entity presupposes the real existence of an enemy and therefore coexistence with another political entity. As long as a state exists, there will thus always be in the world more than one state. A world state which embraces the entire globe and all of humanity cannot exist," wrote Schmitt, in The Concept of the Political, 53. In Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, [orig. pub. 1922] Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1985, Schmitt wrote that the state should have the sovereign power to declare the state of exception, if necessary, to override liberal political bodies and laws to maintain the authority and power of the state. [Return to text]

28. The other moment in U.S. history in which the use of force could be considered analogous to this "pre-emptive" move would be the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki under Truman. Certainly not "pre-emptive" in the sense of acting before an actual attack, but then, this sense in our current world is equally debatable—the bombing that followed the surrender of the Japanese government in World War II could have been calculated to finalize a deterrence of future contestations of U.S. power by any other powers. See Robert J. Art and Kenneth Waltz, Eds., The Use of Force: International Politics and Foreign Policy. Boston: Little Brown, 1971. Indeed, in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, framing the nation's foreign policy in sweeping terms, Bush likened himself to Truman after World War II, restructuring U.S. national security to meet a transcendent new threat. [Return to text]

29. Art and Waltz, Eds., The Use of Force. [Return to text]

30. Stephen Krasner, Ed. International Regimes. Celeste A. Wallander and Robert O. Keohane, "An Institutional Approach to Alliance Theory," Center for International Affairs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1995. See also Keohane, Nye, Hoffman, Eds., After the Cold War. [Return to text]

31. Though within the subfield of sociological institutionalism, a good example of this approach might be found in the following text: John Meyer, John Boli, George Thomas, and Francisco Ramirez. "World Society and the Nation-State," American Journal of Sociology 103: 1 (July 1997): 144-81. Meyer et al. argue that a causally significant world culture creates incentives for countries to conform to the modern nation-state model in order to integrate into world society; alternative models have little legitimacy and find it difficult to survive if they do not assume the legitimized form. [Return to text]

32. Among the most important postwar theories of European integration were Leon N. Lindberg, The Political Dynamics of European Economic Integration. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1963; Ernst Haas, Beyond the Nation-State: Functionalism and International Organization. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964. Current studies include Andrew Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998; Wolfgang Wessels, et al. Eds., Fifteen Into One? The European Union and Its Member States. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. [Return to text]

33. U.S. political science employs a top-down perspective on nation-states as the privileged unit of government and action; women, poor, non-elites, indigenous peoples, and international non-governmental organizations are largely invisible in most of these studies. The international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) that are the most bureaucratized are the most legible for study. [Return to text]

34. Native sovereignty refers to the authority of native peoples to determine and govern themselves. See David E. Wilkins and K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Uneven Ground: American Indian Sovereignty and Federal Law. Tulsa: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002; Paul Chatt Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. New York: New Press, 1997. In Canada, indigenous peoples are referred to as First Nation peoples; in other contexts, native people are considered "Fourth World." The Hawaiian sovereignty movement is a coalition of groups seeing self-determination for native peoples and redress of the U.S. government for military occupation and appropriation of lands beginning in 1893. See Hanauni Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999; Jocelyn Linnekin, "Indigenous Sovereignty Scenarios in Latin America and Hawaii: Parallels and Possibilities," Journal of Latin American Anthropology 1:2 (Spring 1996): 152-163. Aboriginal peoples in Australia have struggled for sovereignty, most recently the 1992 Mabo Case, which declared the long-held terra nullius to be invalid and recognized Aboriginal land claims before British settlement, and subsequent legislation enacted to establish Native title claims. See Ann Curthoys, Freedom Ride: A Freedom Rider Remembers. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2003. For an important collaboration that brings together Native and Pacific discussions of indigenous cultures, see See Vicente Diaz and J. Kehaulani Kauanui, eds., Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge, a special issue of The Contemporary Pacific, Vol. 13, No. 2, Fall 2001. [Return to text]

35. The Asian-African Conference, convened upon the invitation of the Prime Ministers of Burma, Ceylon, India, Indonesia and Pakistan, met in Bandung in April, 1955. In addition to the sponsoring countries, the following 24 countries participated in the Conference: Afghanistan, Cambodia, People's Republic of China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gold Coast, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Jordan, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Nepal, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, Democratic Republic of Vietnam, State of Vietnam, and Yemen. The Asian-African Conference considered problems of common interest and concern to the countries of Asia and Africa and discussed ways and means by which their people could achieve fuller economic, cultural and political co-operation. [Return to text]

36. The Ten Principles of Bandung were:

1. Respect for fundamental human rights and for the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations.
2. Respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations.
3. Recognition of the equality of all races and of the equality of all nations large and small.
4. Abstention from intervention or interference in the internal affairs of another country.
5. Respect for the right of each nation to defend itself singly or collectively, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations.
6. (a) Abstention from the use of arrangements of collective defense to serve any particular interests of the big powers. (b) Abstention by any country from exerting pressures on other countries.
7. Refraining from acts or threats of aggression of the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any country.
8. Settlement of all international disputes by peaceful means, such as negotiation, conciliation, arbitration or judicial settlement as well as other peaceful means of the parties own choice, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations.
9. Promotion of mutual interests and cooperation.
10. Respect for justice and international obligations.

37. The so-called "anti-globalization" movement—less than a decade old and manifested in the popular demonstrations at the Seattle WTO meetings or the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil—has yet to capture the attention of political science, though sociologists have begun to ask if "anti-globalization" may constitute a new transnational social movement. Best understood as "counter-capitalist" or "anti-corporatist," members of the "anti-globalization" movement protest the excesses of unregulated global corporate capitalism, and it includes single-issue groups focused on local agriculture as well as larger-scale transnational coalitions for global environmentalism. At this point, it even includes groups whose imperatives may appear nationally at odds, e.g. U.S. trade unions who object that their jobs are undercut by corporations moving their manufacture to locations with tax holidays and lower wages, and labor groups asking for the greater protection of labor rights and human rights among workers in the maquiladoras, or in the export industry zones. Yet a common target of protest supercedes the inconsistencies held by the various groups: the presumption of economic integration that demands the merging of all countries within a single model of development and into a single, centralized system. Though heterogeneous and even ununified, most participants in the movement propose a case for localization. Localization is a critique of centralized decision-making in the metropolitan headquarters; the case for localization argues that local politics and decision-making must be empowered by actively favoring the local—whether local agriculture, Malaysian arguments against deforestation, or Venezuelan management of its oil industry—it argues for local democratic control of economic processes, and the redistribution of its benefits. The "anti-globalization" movement affirms a vision of global justice in which the powerful will respect the unpowerful, in which the essential needs of all people could be met, with fair distribution so that the poor as well as the wealthy, can sustain growth. See James Harding, "Counter-Capitalism: Globalisation's Children Strike Back," Financial Times, September, 2001; Vandana Shiva, "Ecological Balance in an Era of Globalization," in Principled World Politics: The Challenge of Normative International Relations, Paul Ruiz and Lester Edwin J. Wapner, Eds. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. [Return to text]

38. Leslie Berestein, "Girl in piñata found during border check," San Diego Union Tribune, November 12, 2005. [Return to text]

39. The principle of Manifest Destiny was invoked to justify the late 19th century westward expansion, the U.S. war with Mexico, and the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the U.S.-Mexican War and appropriated the lands that are now California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and New Mexico, from Mexico. Despite being granted equal protection under the law by the Treaty of 1848, for decades following the annexation, most former Mexican citizens occupied subordinate social and economic position. Anglo-American domination over local economies created an environment in which the annexed Mexican population lost political influence. See Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Anglo-saxonism. Cambridge: Harvard, 1981.

In the 1910-1920s, new immigration from Mexico was met with fervent opposition. Anti-immigrant factions represented Mexicans as a threat to the racial, cultural, and social integrity of the U.S. Restrictionists cast Mexicans as a "foreign menace" that threatened the homogeneity of U.S. society. Proponents of immigration represented Mexicans as a tractable labor force to be exploited. But with the Depression, Mexican workers were singled out as scapegoats; nativists charged that they committed crimes and displaced U.S. workers. In the 1930s, repatriation campaigns sought to force workers to return to Mexico; the largest, most publicized campaign was in Los Angeles. As many as 350,000 Mexicans repatriated during the 1930s. See David Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. [Return to text]

40. Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents. [Return to text]

41. Girls and women routinely work within conditions and restrictions that are specifically "feminized": they are often required to wear color-coded smocks under the surveillance of male supervisors who comment on their physical and sexual traits; they receive unwanted touching, leering, verbal and physical advances from both managers and male coworkers; they are threatened and assaulted if they attempt to refuse; the maquiladoras require them to undergo pregnancy testing as a condition of employment and deny them work if they are pregnant; if a young woman becomes pregnant, she may be assigned to unhealthy or unsafe work to force her to resign; women workers are required to give weekly urine samples, and to answer intrusive questions about their sexual activities. Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, For We Are Sold, I and My People: Women and Industry in Mexico's Frontier. Albany: State University of New York, 1983; Susan Tiano, Patriarchy on the Line: Labor, Gender and Ideology in the Mexico Maquila Industry. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994; Leslie Salzinger, Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico's Global Factories, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. [Return to text]

42. The public discourses—from industry recruitment, to newspapers, to popular stereotypes—construct border femininity as docile, abject, and sexually improper. Rosa Linda Fregoso argues that the targeting of the Mexicana as an endangered figure in need of discipline—and not unregulated capitalist industries themselves—is necessary to nation-state discourses on both sides of the border. Fregoso, MeXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. [Return to text]

43. Melissa W. Wright, "A Manifesto Against Feminicide," Antipode 33:3 (July 2001): 550-66, 564. [Return to text]

44. Organizing strategies that emerge from specifically gendered discrimination imply neither the dispersal of struggle nor the passivity of exploited workers. They recognize and bring into evidence a "new" subject impacted by forms of domination that are political, economic, regional and cultural, and gendered within both national and international frameworks. For example, in one instance of cross-border solidarity, maquiladora workers protested a factory's regular requirement of "beauty pageants" in which the women workers were required to parade scantily clad in front of factory managers. When the company responded by closing the factory and refusing the women severance pay, the women were joined by another workers' organization that assisted them in targeting the U.S. parent company that owned the maquiladora, who they pressured to ultimately award the severance checks. With the feminization of work and preferences for women laborers in assembly and manufacture, different strategies for organizing have emerged. These mixed strategies go beyond traditional organizing strategies that focus exclusively on wages or on state remediation. See Norma Iglesias Prieto, Beautiful Flowers of the Maquiladoras: Life Histories of Women Workers in Tijuana. Trans., Michael Stone and Gabrielle Winkler. Austin: University of Texas, 1997; Lisa Lowe, "Work, Immigration, Gender: New Subjects of Cultural Politics," The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital. L. Lowe and D. Lloyd, Eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997; and Grace Kyungwon Hong, The Rupture of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2006. [Return to text]

45. The women activists are "non-state actors" operating as a transnational advocacy network to publicize human rights violations. The norms-socialization literature on international human rights suggests that such advocacy groups aim to establish human rights norms so that they may be internalized by national states who will implement change; such norms define a category of states as "liberal democratic states," which respond quickly to such norms, and "authoritarian" or "norm-violating states" (e.g., China, Cuba) which do not. Moral consciousness-raising by the international human rights community often involves "shaming" of the norm-violating states as "pariah states who do not belong to the community of civilized nations." See Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink, Eds., The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 15.

To the contrary, however, the cross-border environmental campaigns I discuss here are not aimed at creating international norms of individual rights to create hierarchical classifications which discipline "norm-violating" states, but rather they consider all states as "violating" life at the border, and in effect, they target the governmentality—the larger set of social disciplines that includes state institutions, corporate industry, media discourses, border policing, and social norms themselves—that results in the treatment of the border as a zone of disposable life. [Return to text]

46. Norma Iglesias Prieto, Beautiful Flowers of the Maquiladoras. [Return to text]

47. More than a decade of feminicides in Ciudad Juarez are the most publicized example of this gendered violence. See especially, Rosa Linda Fregoso, MeXicana; Alicia Schmidt-Camacho, "Ciudadana X," The New Centennial Review 5:1 (Spring 2005): 255-292; Melissa W. Wright, "The Dialectics of Still Life: Murder, Women and the Maquiladoras," Public Culture 11: 3 (1999): 452-74; Lourdes Portillo's "Señorita Extraviada" (2001). [Return to text]

48. Achille Mbembe, "Necropolitics," Public Culture, 15:1 (2003): 11-40. [Return to text]

49. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998, 139. [Return to text]