"Les Arrebatan Hasta El Cuerpo: Feminicide, Bureaucracy, Grief, and the Poetics of Searching in U.S./Mexico Border Poetry and Film"

• In Event: Enduring Impossibility: Queer/Trans Survival in Latin/x America

Abstract

Grounded in an exploitative, imperial, transnational labor history, Les Arrebatan Hasta El Cuerpo: Feminicide, Bureaucracy, Grief, and the Poetics of Searching in U.S./Mexico Border Poetry and Film analyzes transnational texts and films written by Mexican women on the U.S.-Mexico border as an exploration of grief and kinship in spaces where violence challenges people’s ability to grieve publicly and collectively. This essay elucidates the bureaucratic barriers that Mexican women (cis and trans) face as an extension of the violence of feminicides by analyzing the ways the state attempts to mediate public grief through insidious tactics that attempt to divide and subordinate victims of gendered violence. Building on theories of necro-administration from transfeminist writer Sayak Valencia and drawing upon works such as Antigona Gonzalez by Sara Uribe (2012), and Ruido directed by Natalia Beristaín, I examine the necropolitics of bureaucracy and how victims’ families reclaim agency from it through discourse. Subsequently, these works illuminate the way silence is produced and maintained by conditions of fear and terror, state apparatuses, and other violent participants. In this, I ask how the body is at the forefront of different grieving processes and critique how the state mediates corporeal and affective relations about the public grievability of queer and trans people. Ultimately, this essay outlines a “poetic of endurance” as a response to violence that is broached by the work of queer and trans people.

Author

• Jonathan Donabo, University of California Riverside