Beyond the Pink Tide by Macarena Gomez-Barris

Author:Macarena Gomez-Barris
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520296664
Publisher: University of California Press

GORE CAPITALISM

Hemispheric trans-feminist critique can show us how gendered and sexed bodies differently experience the political economy of drug and social wars throughout Mexico and Central America. In the shadow of the border, Brown women and children have disproportionately suffered the consequences of military capitalism’s intensification.7 As Mexicans, Haitians, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, and Hondurans, in addition to those at the receiving end of the so-called Muslim ban, have all too directly experienced, brute state power exerts itself by defining the boundaries of legality, citizenship, and access to inclusion.8

In this brutal border context, the work of the Tijuana-based trans-feminist scholar Sayak Valencia’s work expands on Achille Membe’s concept of necropolitics, which refers to the sovereign power of the state to dictate who may live and who may die. For Membe, state power is organized to “exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.”9 Along the US-Mexico border transmigrants, maquila workers, and those caught within the transits and crossfire of drug wars very much live in the shadow of the state’s necropolitical and sovereign power. The life and death transits of migrant populations along the border intensifies state power through the rationale of US military presence that totalizes domination over human life as a form of social control.

Extending Membe’s theory, Sayek Valencia’s work on capitalismo gore describes the gendered and violent experience of frontier capitalism. Gore or slasher capitalism, depending on how you translate it, addresses state and extralegal power where particular bodies such as migrants, sex workers, and maquila workers are disposed of by a capitalist machine that extracts value by exploiting their labor. The term names how capitalism produces violence as surplus in its most extreme form, including kidnapping, the human organ exchange, torture, and assassination, within and outside the new drug economies.10

In particular, transmigrants, poor women, sex workers, children, and maquila workers populate the “free trade” zone between the United States and Mexico as the human and gendered debris of the global economy with rising rates of feminicide (murder of women) and transmigrant deaths across the border. Valencia carefully attends to how security rhetoric and state practices organize hierarchies of death through a machine of violent masculinity. As racial capitalism builds ever more borders and walls, it fortifies masculine state impunity; it also intensifies social and economic divisions in the border region.

Valencia’s work makes new claims about old problems based on her awareness of the long history of trans-feminist debate and on her scholarly analysis of the border frontier. In addition to building on Membe’s concept of the necropolitical, she engages the Chicana theorist and poet Gloria Anzaldúa’s poignant and classic book, Borderlands/La Frontera, describing how the binary gender formation within the border region comes from the overlapping processes of Spanish colonialism, Mexican nation-state building, and US imperialism.11 Whereas the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo annexing the northern third of Mexico’s territory could be described as a single historical event, Anzaldúa instead refers to the lasting legacies of US expansionism that persist as an “open wound.

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