Migration and Necromasculinity in Cultural Representations of Mexican Neoliberalism

Speaker: Elizabeth Villalobos, Assistant Professor, World Languages and Literatures, University of Nevada Reno

Mexican neoliberalism following the passage of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 has exacerbated both state and cartel violence, created a migration crisis, and led to an explosion of representations of killers in both fictional and nonfictional cultural production set on Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala and its northern border with the United States. The development of what I am calling “necromasculinity,” a form of masculinity that prizes killing, shows a shift in the Mexican cultural field towards the production of neoliberal narratives where murderer figures are presented as an allegory of the economic impacts in the constructions of gender, race, and national identity portrayed in prose, theater, and film produced between 1999 and 2019. David Harvey has argued that neoliberalism is difficult to contest due to its diverse and transnational institutions that have lowered barriers to trade globally while also weakening social services, amplifying economic inequality, and inviting human rights abuses. At a time when Mexico leads the world in the assassination of journalists, it is Mexican writers and filmmakers who have been left to register the harrowing realities and quotidian repetitiveness of extreme levels of violence.

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Meeting ID: 940 9236 5675

Passcode: 902943