The 7th Annual Janice Monk Visiting
Distinguished Professor Lecture
Feminicido, Narcoviolence,
Gentrification: The Feminist
Fight on Mexico’s Border
Presented by
Dr. Melissa W. Wright
Department of Geography and
Department of Women Studies
Pennsylvania State University
The fight against impunity continues along the Mexico border, especially in the industrial hub of
Ciudad Juarez. In the 1990s, feminists brought this fight to international attention launching a
transnational justice movement against feminicidio, the killing of women with impunity. In this
presentation, Wright employs a feminist and Marxist frame to show there is much to be learned
from the fight against feminicidio in Ciudad Juarez now also infamous for juvenicidio, the killing of
youth with impunity; both are occurring in relation to the Mexican government’s declaration of war
against organized crime. By situating these justice struggles within a context of North American
securitization and neoliberal gentrification along the border, Wright argues that the feminist fight
against impunity exposes the synergy of symbolic and material processes within the drug war that
seek to generate value through the extermination of whole populations, especially of working poor
women and their families, in this border city today.
Friday, March 22, 2013, 3:30 p.m.
Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, S202
Melissa W. Wright is a professor of Geography and of Women’s Studies at The Pennsylvania State
University. Her research investigates the formation of political subjects at the nexus of capitalist
exploitation, the making of social movements and the experience of state-sanctioned violence along
the Mexico-US border. Her work includes Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism (Routledge, 2006) in addition to numerous articles published in geography, cultural studies and
feminist journals. Her current collaborative research investigates how daily experience of violence
and militarization affect la vida fronteriza (“the border life”) along both sides of the Mexico-US border.
Light Reception to Follow
Sponsored by The School of Geography and Development
The Center for Latin American Studies,
The Department of Gender and Women's Studies,
and The Southwest Institute for Research on Women