Women and Mass Violence
Although all groups of people are affected by large-scale violence, women experience it in specific ways. We need only think of the systematic murders of Indigenous women and girls in North America and Latin America, or of the many armed conflicts (in Syria, Libya, Myanmar, and others) where rape is used as a weapon of war. These two phenomena may also overlap: one of the first cases of feminicide to be named and documented as such in the Americas was that of Mayan women during the Guatemalan civil war in the early 1980s. Women are not only victims of mass violence, however, they are also the first to speak out, denounce, and oppose it. This second Spirale Special Issue, co-edited by Nadia Myre and Jean-Philippe Uzel, brings together articles and visual projects in which gender-related mass violence is described and analyzed. Contributors seek to raise awareness of the way in which this violence is represented, especially since patriarchy, colonialism, political interests and official incompetence often render it invisible and inaudible.
A print edition of this issue was released in Montreal in December 2018. It includes essays, artworks, exhibition reviews, and poems. Here are English and French translations of the texts included in the magazine, which appeared in their original versions.
Teresa Margolles, Pesquisas (Inquiries), 2016. Installation, 33 color prints of photographs of street signs showing missing women that cover the walls of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico from the nineties until today, 100 x 70 cm (each); 301 x 704,5 cm (allover). Installation view at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 2017.Photo : Richard-Max Tremblay. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich.
Each iteration of a mass-violence phenomenon corresponds to specific places and objects that characterize and symbolize it. With the thousands of victims of the Syrian conflict, we associate, among other things, smashed residential buildings and bombed hospitals; with migrants trying to reach Europe, makeshift boats and perfunctory life jackets; with those making their way to the American border, border walls, arid landscapes, and empty water bottles; with genocides of Indigenous peoples, contaminated blankets, residential schools, and golf courses; with violence against African Americans, armed police officers and overpopulated prisons; with terrorist attacks, airliners and vehicles used as ramming weapons. But what places and objects would be characteristic of mass violence against women? This violence is taking place at such a scale, is so ubiquitous and has been so for such a long time, and intersects with so many other forms of violence among those listed above that it seems almost useless to try to locate it on the fine markings of a scale or to identify specific objects that embody it. “We have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories,” wrote Arjun Appadurai in 1986. “It is only through the analysis of these trajectories that we can interpret the human interactions and calculations that enliven things.”
The analysis of the trajectory of spatial objects involved in mass-violence phenomena was the subject of two exhibitions presented simultaneously at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, which were the starting point for the Topographies de la violence de masse project, of which this publication is part. Teresa Margolles’s exhibition Mundos highlighted certain objects that somehow gave materiality to the violence against women and transgender people in Mexico, whether it was by moving the remains from a house abandoned by the family of a dead woman, by recovering the neon lights from an old bar in Ciudad Juárez—the city where so many women were murdered—by photographing the ruins of dance floors in discotheques previously visited by transgender people who are now dead, or by archiving the wanted posters put up by the families of women who have disappeared. Margolles, taking on the role of medium, was able to make places and objects speak.What they had to tell us was frightening. My exhibition Et maintenant regardez cette machine looked at a range of different roles played by “war hotels” in the representation of conflicts. When a conflict breaks out, and when it is possible, international journalists swoop in to cover the event. They tend to gather in the same hotels to live and work. That is where they meet up with other protagonists of the conflict, thus endowing these places with a strategic function.[1]
During the different stages of Topographies de la violence de masse—exhibitions, day-long seminars, a conference, film screenings, and reading the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada—we wondered how seemingly innocuous spatial objects such as houses, schools, walls, trees, boats, clinics, cameras, and smartphones, to name just a few, could be transformed into dangerous tools, used against those whom they were supposed to help, even to the point of denying their very humanity. In parallel, we observed that in order to escape the polarization of the media between unrepresentability and spectacularization, a great number of artists and filmmakers become topographers by describing, recording, and portraying the traces of this violence in places that are steeped in it, directly or indirectly.
As part of my research on war hotels, I had identified this aspect of the instrumentation of conflict representation as another “power-knowledge” institution. Here, I was following the concept developed by Michel Foucault, who established close parallels between certain spatial objects and discourses related to power. In Archaeology of Power (2002), Foucault defined discourse as a communal opinion that emanates from a series of “statements,” which are not sourced exclusively in linguistics. In Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1995), he wrote, “Surveillance is expressed in the architecture by innumerable petty mechanisms” that strengthen knowledge and, by implication, a certain form of productive power. Consistent with my research on the agency of war hotels as aid spaces, my current film project explores the 4×4 vehicles used in humanitarian missions and the aid that they help deliver. These vehicles are often painted white, signalling the possibility of assistance and of finding refuge. They transport representatives of expertise and skill, as well as equipment and medication. In this sense, they confer power upon those who drive them. The “all-terrain” nature of the vehicles enables them to reach remote zones, and their technical capacities create ways of being and acting: used as a tool, they produce means of action and ways of thinking. The 4x4s are objects and spaces that define distinctions between the privileged and the afflicted, between the helpers and the helped, between the powerful and the weak. The closed space of the car is a protected and mobile space for those who come and go, who are there with no obligation to be there or stay there.
Shipment of equipment for a Red Cross emergency mission. Red Cross Emergency Items catalogue.
Preparatory research for the film took me to Haiti, which I chose because it is the country hosting the largest number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the world. Some Haitians even call their country, ironically, the “Republic of NGOs.” There, in February 2018, a scandal broke out involving management employees of the humanitarian organization Oxfam, who had hired Haitian sex workers for parties in their official villas during the aid mission following the earthquake of January 2010 that killed more than 230,000 people and left more than 1.5 million homeless. These actions were universally condemned. Oxfam, which was aware of them at the time they took place, was criticized for not reporting them to the local authorities, as prostitution is illegal in Haiti and international organizations are required to respect the laws of the countries in which they operate. Many people also commented that there was nothing new or surprising there, and that abusive sexual conduct by certain employees of humanitarian aid organizations was common, even systemic, and had been for many years (Khan,2018; Aziz, 2018). In the colonial era, it had been claimed that white men living in the tropics suffered from what CharlesWoodruff, an American army physician in the Philippines, called “tropical neurasthenia,” the symptoms of which included melancholy, alcoholism, paranoia, and sexual deviancies (Woodruff,1905). In other words, due to heat and humidity, cultural confusion, and lack of distractions, white men succumbed to the temptation of having sex with local women.
These habits developed in the colonies were maintained and adapted in the era of humanitarian aid. In 1995, a guide for humanitarian workers written by the United Nations Agency for Refugees (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR) recognized the involvement of international humanitarian workers in cases of sexual violence against refugee populations and noted that in many cases, sexual services had been required in exchange for assistance, food, or attribution of refugee status. My search for spatial objects that characterize violence against women therefore involved following humanitarian aid itself—which, in a complete reversal of expectations, is sometimes used to exploit rather than help the world’s most disadvantaged and vulnerable people.
In 2002, a report by the United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services acknowledged the existence of a large-scale problem of sexual exploitation in West Africa, defined in the report as a situation in which an employee of an NGO or international humanitarian aid organization in a position of power uses this power to demand sexual services in exchange for goods, food, or services that refugees would otherwise have the right to receive free of charge. How can we fathom that exploitation of and violence toward women, including minors, can exist in parallel with humanitarian aid? This aid is deployed with major logistical assistance from organizations that—theoretically—hold universal human rights values at their core. Entities such as Oxfam and the UNHCR develop processes for reflecting on the ethics of intervention, the results of which are published year after year in guides and detailed reports (Rowlands, 2014). For instance, Oxfam has published 1,458 documents on the question of gender, 582 on issues of governance and citizenship, 471 on human rights, and 212 on inequalities. This plethora of publications helps to reinforce the impression of both the general public and accreditation bodies that these organizations are in complete control of the ethical process involved in their interactions with vulnerable populations. One can assume that such trust tends to reduce the level of vigilance that might otherwise make it possible to detect certain abusive and exploitative behaviours more quickly and effectively. It is therefore understandable why the Haitian government, when it withdrew Oxfam Great Britain’s NGO status on June 13, 2018, also announced that a bill was being prepared to authorize better oversight of the activities of NGOs working in the country.
Mechanisms for detecting and controlling sexual exploitation can be effective only with the full cooperation of international NGOs, which are mandated by privileged populations to provide aid to vulnerable ones. The former are responsible for ensuring that this mandate is respected on behalf of the latter. Therefore, they must receive the necessary information, and the external oversight mechanisms must function properly, so that results of internal inquiries are not quashed, as they were by Oxfam in Haiti. It is important for the media to ensure that NGOs are held responsible for their actions in their different missions in the field, within the legislative frameworks that vary from country to country. NGO workers’ continuous presence in what can be very dangerous territories makes them particularly important to journalists, who count on these contacts to organize the logistics of their travels and provide them with information for their reports (Meyer et al., 2018). In the early 2000s, when the United States invaded Iraq, there was strong criticism of the practice of embedding journalists[2]: because they were travelling with American troops, they were able to see only one aspect of the conflict and were totally dependent on the military for all aspects of daily life (transportation, provision of food and lodging, access to communications technologies). This proximity and dependence raised the fear that a sense of complicity would develop between soldiers and journalists and that the latter would be less rigorous in their reporting of the actions of the former. Similar questions should be asked about the relations between the media and international NGOs.
In contexts in which the rape of women is used as a weapon of war to terrorize and control populations, arriving in refugee camps should mean, for persecuted populations and for women in particular, the end of exploitation and the beginning of a return to a situation in which their physical and mental integrity is no longer threatened. The presence of humanitarian aid organizations in areas that have become lawless zones sometimes offers local populations their only hope for improving their living conditions, or even for survival. It is clear that this state of affairs places humanitarian workers in a position of power over disadvantaged populations. Abuses of power are so frequent that simply sanctioning the offending humanitarian workers is obviously not enough. The problem lies upstream, in the governance structures of these NGOs.[3]Because 79 percent of the activities of international NGOs are conducted in low- or middle-income countries and 66 percent of their leaders, a large majority of whom are men, are of European origin, it is urgent, even before subsidies to NGOs involved in sex scandals are cut,[4]that these organizations challenge their own governance structures, too many of which are run by white men. This will enable international NGOs to consistently apply their values of respect, equity, and equality in their field missions, and to ensure that the trajectory of the aid provided does not lead to more violence.
Translated by Käthe Roth
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Appadurai, Arjun, ed. (1986), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspectives,Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Aziz, Shaista (2018), “As a Former Aid Worker, I’m Not Shocked by the Oxfam Revelations,”The Guardian,February 12, 2018.
Foucault, Michel (2002), Archaeology of Knowledge, Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith, London and New York, Routledge. Originally published as L’archéologie du savoir(Paris: Gallimard, 1969).
Foucault, Michel (1995), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Translated by Alan Sheridan, New York, Random House. Originally published as Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison(Paris: Gallimard, 1993).
Jarboe, Norma (2012), Charity Leaders 2012: Benchmarking the Participation of Women in the UK’s Largest Charities, U.K., WomenCount. https://womencountblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/women_count_report_2012.pdf.
Khan, Mishal S. (2018), “Oxfam: Sex Scandal or Governance Failure?,” The Lancet391 (10125), 1019–20.
Licha, Emanuel (2018), “On Re-enacting a Hotel Space,”Intermédialités,no28–29 (Fall 2017–Spring 2018). https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/im/2016-n28-29-im03201/1041089ar/.
Licha, Emanuel (2017), “Un hôtel de guerre est bien plus qu’un bâtiment, In Et maintenant regardez cette machine, Montreal, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 73–78.
Meyer, Christoph O., Eric Sangar, and Eva Michaels (2018), “How Do Non-governmental Organizations Influence Media Coverage of Conflict? The Case of the Syrian Conflict, 2011–2014,” Media, War & Conflict 11 (1), 149–71.
United Nations (2002), Report of the Office of Internal Oversight Services on the Investigation into Sexual Exploitation of Refugees by Aid Workers in West Africa. http://www.un.org/news/dh/infocus/a-57-465.pdf.
Rowlands, Jo. (2014),Making the Impossible Possible: An Overview of Governance Programming in Fragile Contexts, Oxfam GB. https://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/making-the-impossible-possible-an-overview-of-governance-programming-in-fragile-331984.
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (1995), Sexual Violence Against Refugees: Guidelines on Prevention and Response. http://www.unhcr.org/publications/operations/3b9cc26c4/sexual-violence-against-refugees-guidelines-prevention-response-unhcr.html.
Woodruff, Charles (1905), The Effects of Tropical Light on White Men, Rebman Company. https://archive.org/stream/cu31924029901208.
[2] The practice of embedded journalism consists of incorporating journalists into a military unit on which they depend for transportation—and for survival. See Stephen Farrell, “Embedistan,” New York Times, June 25, 2010; Terence Smith, “The Real-Time War: Defining News in theMiddle East,” Columbia Journalism Review 42 (May/June 2003): 26–28.
[3] For example, among the largest NGOs in the United States, fewer than 14 percent are led by women, as compared to 27 percent in Great Britain. See Jennifer T. Nozawa, “The Glass Ceiling of Nonprofits: A Review of Gender Inequality in U.S. Nonprofit Organization Executives,” policy brief, Center for Public Policy & Administration(University of Utah, 2010); Fairouz El Tom, “Diversity and Inclusion on NGO Boards: What the Stats Say,” The Guardian,May 7, 2013; and DonnaBryson, “Diversifying NGO Leadership,” Stanford Social Innovation Review (Spring 2013).
[4] Vulnerable populations will still pay the price. As a result of the scandal involving Oxfam Great Britain in Haiti, the British government cut off part of its grants. For more information, see Nick Hopkins, “Oxfam to Axe Jobs and Aid Programmes in £16m Cuts after Scandal,” The Guardian,June 15, 2018.
Emanuel Licha is an artist and filmmaker, with an education first in urban geography and then in visual arts. In his films and video installations, he explores the roles of certain sites and spatial objects as mediators in the representation and comprehension of geopolitical events. He envisages objects in the urban landscape as social, historical, and political indices. In his recent projects, he challenges the means used to observe and report on violent and traumatic events. Licha holds a doctorate in visual cultures from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a professor in the department of art history and film studies at the Université de Montréal.
On the margins of American hyper-power, in the very heart of North America, women are dying—because they are women. In this sad geography of feminicide, the border town of Ciudad Juárez has become a symbol. In “We Want to Stay Alive”: Ending Feminicide in Juárez, Mexico, Alice Driver notes that almost fifteen hundred women have disappeared or died there since 1993. The normalization of violence, which is both generalized (eleven thousand victims of drug cartels have been counted) and specific in that it disproportionately affects women (the murder rate for women is four times higher in Ciudad Juárez than in the rest of Mexico), is now part of the reality of the border zone.
It has reached the point that many residents of El Paso—the twin city of Ciudad Juárez on the American side—rarely cross the border, and when they do, it is usually during daytime, to go directly to the airport. They no longer go there to shop or dine at a restaurant, as they had done for so many years. Yet, behind the remains of this bygone world that do not reflect the contemporary vitality of Ciudad Juárez (some of which are highlighted by artist Teresa Margolles in works such as her installation featuring the neon sign Mundos), there is the persistent normalization of violence against women.
Teresa Margolles
Mundos (Worlds), 2016
Installation, neon sign from a bar in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, speaker, 87,5 x 522 x 20,5 cm
Installation view at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 2017. Photo: Rafael Burillo
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich
Unique in the way that she tackles this theme and in her own proximity to the subject,[1]Margolles puts the morbid reality of feminicide in Ciudad Juárez into perspective by bringing to light the world of the women who have died—butchered, mutilated, tortured, autopsied. Murders, mutilations, and mass graves in ditches shape the reality of this border zone, the recent history of which is tied to free trade, the establishment ofmaquiladoras,[2]the disengagement of the Mexican state, and the grip of drug cartels such as the Aztecas. In fact, feminicide in this region—and feminicides in general—are based partly on “political, social, economic, cultural inequalities,” as Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano wrote in 2010: the true geography of this mass violence is linked to the poorest neighbourhoods, with the fewest services and street lights, around factories.
The space where this violence is expressed is important in the sense that it illustrates the close link between globalization and feminicide based on substantial changes to the role of women, which have upset the established order. Indeed, maquiladoras are instrumental in the redefinition of the place of women, in two ways. First, they offer jobs that encourage women to leave the most isolated regions of Mexico, many of which suffer from a high unemployment rate. Second, they change the structure of the job market by feminizing it, which ends up altering the very notion of the female head of family, as women are earning their own income. This upheaval of the established order runs headlong into the terms of Mexican patriarchal society, imbued with machismo and marianismo.”[3]This socioeconomic collision offers a partial explanation for the mass violence, in a context where the brutality of the maquiladoras is in any case omnipresent—beyond the fact that at least one third of murdered women were connected to one of these factories—and ranges from the control over bodies (obligatory urine tests, inspection of sanitary napkins, forced contraception) to disappearances during trips to or from the factory.
The grip of this patriarchal culture also explains the decisive role of the state in the reality of this mass violence. It is manifested both by government inaction (corruption or denial by police officers, slowness or inadequacy of the legal system, absence of legal characterization of the facts, trivialization of homicides) and by the way in which the legal system orders and classifies homicide cases. In this context, as Amnesty International showed in a 2005 report, mass violence is anchored in institutional and state practices, which makes it systemic in nature[4].
Of course, the phenomenon is not exclusive to the border town of Ciudad Juárez, nor to the state of Chihuahua, nor even to Mexico. The geography of feminicides goes well beyond, extending across the Northern Triangle,including Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, a space marked by omnipresent gangs, the stigma of civil wars, and internal tensions solidifying the lack of a constitutional state. And although certain countries have tried to adjust their penal and legal systems to this reality, violence against women explains, in large part, today’s feminization of migratory flows; increasingly, women, alone or with children, are undertaking the journey northward.
In this context, the gradual hardening of the American border—the strengthening of surveillance, the deportations, the erection of ever-more impenetrable walls and the intensification of patrols in zones without a physical barrier—only increases women’s vulnerability. Like all migrants, they must opt for more dangerous strategies, riskier journeys that require them to cross through hostile territory and force them to use the services of human smugglers called coyotes.
Continuous wall on the Arizona border, Douglas zone, 2016
Photo: Élisabeth Vallet
Under these circumstances, they may have to use their own bodies as a safe-conduct, submitting to the desires of the traffickers in order to gain passage—rape constituting what Ruiz Marrujo calls “the price of freedom.” In fact, the violence of migration is such that 80 percent of women and girls coming from Central America testify that they were sexually assaulted at least once during their migratory passage; NGOs estimate that the real numbers are probably higher. This explains why those involved in the migratory process suggest that women systematically take contraception—the question is not whether women will be assaulted but when—before even starting their trip.
The border weighs disproportionately on migrant women, as it defines a space both denationalized and hyper-nationalized in which women are caught in a vise. This tension logically leads to a hyper-militarization of the border area, now perceived as a conflict zone, as evidenced by the headlines on news television channels that regularly speak of the “front,” or National Geographic Channel’s “Border Wars” series. In this space, ever-more violent in the South and ever-more militarized in the North, women are exposed to exacerbated violence on both sides of the border. At a time when migratory policies in the United States and the practice of externalization of the border in Mexico strengthen this mass violence, deported women now live in fear of having to face precisely what they are fleeing in their home countries.
Barbed wire, wall, and surveillance at the border, Nogales border crossing, 2016
Photo: Élisabeth Vallet
With this in mind, artist Susan Harbage Page gathers, along the paths traced by the passage of migrants—north of the border—the objects that they leave behind: empty water bottles, jackets that become too warm when the sun roasts the desert, photographs, identity papers, and so on. But, she says, when she finds women’s undergarments, the story changes in tone: where they have been dropped, a rape has been committed. Harbage Page refers to “rape trees,” trees at the border on which women’s undergarments are hung, themselves bearers of symbolic violence, both an illustration of reality and a performative discourse exploited by border patrols to conveniently denounce the coyotes’ violence without evoking that of the border agents or the Minutemen.
Susan Harbage Page
Object No. 8. found near Brownsville, Texas, 2008,from Anti-Archive of Human Trauma on the U.S.-Mexico Border, U.S.-Mexico Border Project, 2007–ongoing
Courtesy of the artist
The vulnerability of female migrants is obvious in the North, including at the hands of border-control agents, who promise to release them in exchange for sex. Because denunciations are rare, as evidenced by the few charges laid against border and immigration agents—and given the current climate, they will be even scarcer—the agents’ feeling of impunity is real. One of the tasks of Mark Morgan, ex-chief of the Border Patrol appointed by Barack Obama, was to get rid of the shadow zone in which border patrols had no accountability: he was forced to resign by the new president in January 2017.
This violence is also state violence: it authorizes the incarceration of raped women in cold cells without treatment, forces them to give birth in handcuffs, and provides for their separation from their children after they have clandestinely crossed the border by incarcerating them and placing their children in distant facilities. In this framework, and in the contemporary context of an anti-migration administration, it follows that women are denied access even to basic services—gynecology, family planning, or abortion clinics—with little regard for whether or not they have been assaulted.
Because “culture wars” have abandoned other issues to focus on women’s bodies (through debates linked to access to pre- and post-natal care, abortion, and contraception), which have become targets of choice of American legislators at both the federal and state levels, the violence against women at the border is implicitly tolerated; further, it is systematized. Yet, in the 1990s, the visibility of feminicide in Ciudad Juárez opened the way to feminist human-rights movements that go well beyond the border zone—as evidenced by the Women’s Marches, a movement started on January 20, 2017. This resistance movement enabled Martha Patricia Castañeda Salgado to discuss, in “Feminicide in Mexico: An Approach through Academic, Activist and Artistic Work” (2016), the complexity of mass violence against women, which requires a transdisciplinary approach combining activism, academic research, and artworks.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bissonnette, Andréanne, and Elisabeth Vallet (2017), “Migration, Border Crossing and Women: Female Migrant Sexualities Between Objectification and Empowerment,” In Women and Borders: Refugees, Migrants and Communities,edited by Seema Shekhawat and Debidatta Aurobinda, London and New York, I.B. Tauris, 151–73.
Cantú, Francisco (2018), The Line Becomes a River—Dispatches from the Border, New York, Riverhead Books.
Castañeda Salgado, Martha Patricia (2016), “Feminicide in Mexico: An Approach through Academic, Activist and Artistic Work,” Current Sociology 64 (7), 1054–70.
Driver, Alice (2016), “‘We Want to Stay Alive’: Ending Feminicide in Juárez, Mexico,” World Policy Journal 33 (4), 39–46.
Livingston, Jessica (2004), “Murder in Juárez: Gender, Sexual Violence, and the Global Assembly Line,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies25 (1), 59–76.
Menjívar, Cecilia, and Shannon D. Walsh (2017), “The Architecture of Feminicide: The State, Inequalities, and Everyday Gender Violence in Honduras,” Latin American Research Review 52 (2), 221–40.
Miller, Todd (2014), Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security, San Francisco, City Lights Publishers.
Ruiz Marrujo, Olivia T. (2009), “Women, Migration and Sexual Violence—Lessons from Mexico’s Borders,” In Human Rights Along the U.S.-Mexico Border: Gendered Violence and Insecurity, edited by Kathleen A. Staudt, Tony Payan, Z. and Anthony Kruszewski,Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 31–47.
Schatz, Sara (2017), Sexual Homicide of Women on the U.S.–Mexican Border, New York, Springer.
Staudt, Kathleen, and Zulma Y. Méndez (2015), Courage, Resistance, and Women in Ciudad Juárez: Challenges to Militarization, Austin, University of Texas Press.
[2] Maquiladoras are factories that were first set up in northern Mexico in the 1960s and have proliferated since the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement. They are exempt from duties on the import of goods used to assemble merchandise bound for exportation.
[3] This nuance has developed in the analysis of gender relations in the Latin-American world, distinguishing a “macho” culture, in which the woman submits to the man, and a “Marianista” culture, in which the woman must remain pure. See Julia Monarrez Fragoso (2008), “An Analysis of Feminicide in Ciudad Juárez: 1993–2007,” In Strengthening Understanding of Feminicide: Using Research to Galvanize Action and Accountability, meeting proceedings (Washington, DC, PATH et al.), 57–65.
[4] See Amnesty International (2005), Mexico: Justice Fails in Ciudad Juárez and the City of Chihuahua,and Comision para Prevenir y Erradicar la Violencia contre las Mujeres en Ciudad Juárez (2005), Segunda Informe de gestión – mayo 2004–abril 2005.
Élisabeth Vallet is scientific director of the Chaire Raoul-Dandurand and an associate professor in the department of geography at UQAM. She directs the Quebec section of the pan-Canadian Borders in Civilization study group and the Frontières research group of the Chaire Raoul-Dandurand – both funded by SSHRC. She is a member of the board of the Association for Borderland Studies. Her works on border walls, published by Ashgate,in the Journal of Borderland Studies, and in Études internationales, have served as the basis for computer graphics developed by The Economist, theWashington Post, and Courrier international. She received the Richard Morrill Outreach Award from the American Association of Geographers in 2017.
In the fall of 2014, I was approached by Sylvie Paré to create a work for an exhibition she was curating as part of Printemps autochtone 2015 at the Maison de la culture Frontenac. What I remember most from our conversation is the way she reached out to invite me to collaborate on her project. Instead of picking a pre-existing work or giving me carte blanche as curators often do, she asked me to respond to her vision, which she had grounded in a piece of dreamlike prose she had written and shared with me, calling upon me to make a video work that would both respond to her dream and set the tone of the exhibition. When Jean-Philippe invited me to guest edit this special issue, I felt it necessary that Sylvie be a contributor since her curating of Oubliées ou disparues: Akonessen, Zitya, Tina, Marie et les autresis one of the few exhibitions I am aware of that is explicitly about Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls. What follows is a seldom-seen curatorial and creative process, nourished by dreams, events and artistic responses.
Nadia Myre
The case of murdered and missing Indigenous women also concerns us as living women. One does not preclude the other, and it is our responsibility to make their voices heard.
I decided to write this text… freely. Since this exhibition took place over a single year, I wanted to come back to these works while scoffing at the time factor that conflates past, present and future.As a commissioner invited by Les Productions Ondinnok, I created Oubliées ou disparues: Akonessen, Zitya, Tina, Marie et les autres.[1]This exhibition attempts to consider three types of violence: the first, institutional, is that of the instruments of remembering or forgetting often embodied by museums; the second is social and media violence, such as that surrounding missing and murdered Indigenous girls and women in Canada; the third is the violence experienced within the intimate sphere, inflicted by loved ones. If exposing pieces that reveal the violence against women is perilous, writing about it is equally so. Considering some of these pieces from a poetic perspective was the only way I could discuss the violence: too present, too disturbing, it’s always more than we can bear and risks paralyzing us. That’s why I chose the literary form of the diary, which allowed me to put thoughts and inspirations to paper, but most of all to ward off night terrors, the Goya-esque ghosts flying over my body.
April 29, 2015.[2]Today, while we were setting up the Disparition institutionnalisée installation,hundreds of kilometres away in Nova Scotia a trial was taking place for the murders of Victoria Hennebery and Blake Legette. The accused had already been sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Loretta Saunders. The event coincided with the opening of the exhibition. The installation that I created includes a text inspired by Emmanuelle Walter’s book Sœursvolées: enquête sur un féminicide au Canada[Stolen Sisters: Investigating a Femicide in Canada] (Lux Éditeurs, 2014). The work is a way of bringing Loretta to life within us, to make her heard, to resurrect her. It provoked an unexpected conflict within me, a breath sent from who knows where, through the simple chain of events or by an organization unknown in time and space, a light touch, a gentle whisper, an inner voice in passing… a simple obsession related to the very process of creating.
Anonymous artist, Disparition institutionnalisée [Institutionalized Disappearance],2015
Inkjet print on canvas, wood and metal. City of Montréal art collection.
Photo: Martine Doyon
February 12, 2016. In a breath left on a mane in the sky, I’m seeking the shadows of these filthy gestures. Previously suspended, this always-swaying time mocks the inner quiet. I danced. Often beneath the trees, sometimes in the rain or gathering fog, my feet ablaze with sparks propelled me towards the sky’s black hole. My clothes spun with each step. At daybreak, I hung sacred symbols in recognition of this invisible world, perhaps destined for spirits, animal deities, entities, life forces, or something more subtle: bacteria or molecules? Back to earth, at dusk, I danced no more. My body knotted, gagged, I fainted. The shadow was watching me.
Diane Blacksmith, Shawl of Kukum, 2015
Moose hide and beaded pearls with cotton string andbirch
Photo: Martine Doyon
Courtesy of the artist
September 6, 2008. This faceless woman reminds me of all those women seeking to exist, to dive, and to surface once again in this world. The circle dance of broken bodies just keeps turning. This head has the universal face of non-existence, barely an object slipping from the hands, forgotten on the sidewalk and exposed to any use: wiping off, spitting, hitting, then sweeping it away with a final kick. This empty face can also be the receptacle of a variation of stains and lines: bruises, hematomas, scratches disappearing on the surface of the paper and reappearing, in us, in the shape of body memory. If a body is so difficult for women to bear, it’s because a body neither belongs to us nor involves us. Although we are the creators, it is a body invented for others and possessed by others. A total flattening of the very substance of living. An insult on two legs. Insult: feminine noun.
Diane Robertson, Études de corps [Body Studies], undated
Pencil crayons, red chalk, charcoal, soft pastels on sketching paper
Loan from the Fondation Diane Robertson Inc., Musée amérindien de Mashteuiatsh
Photo: Martine Doyon
Courtesy of the Fondation Diane Robertson
March 20, 2012. Everything started with a dream. One night, a reverie appeared, as a wave carried by its foam. I slept, I woke, I turned over, and the night enveloped me. I have trouble remembering, but I know it will return. It always returns, often during bafflingly trivial moments, early in the morning for example, in my car on the way to work. My spirit travels and this vision comes back to me. A road at night, very dark and scarcely travelled, punctuated by solitary streetlights that plunge everything beyond their perimeter in an even darker blackness. In the distance, I see a car with its headlights on; in front of these rays of light, young girls pass, seeming unattainable, wrecked and graceful all at once, free from danger. I think I see my niece, walking in slow motion, absorbed by the contours of the forest. The lighting is dramatic; everything seems overexposed. The whiteness, more luminous than ever, blinds me for a few moments. I try to reach her, but she can neither see nor hear me, so I slip beneath the car and come up near the windshield and write on the foggy window with the tips of my fingers: SAVE YOURSELF!
Nadia Myre, Untitled/Anonymes, 2015
Video, 8 min 5 s
City of Montréal art collection
Photo: Martine Doyon
Courtesy of the artist
April 13, 2018. When I look back, I consider the objectification of my emotions. Like a beast seeing its reflection in a river, I attempted to catch the deceptive waters’ beauties and miseries in my net. From east to west, north to south, I notice the same basic systems of oppression, the same tools of destruction, used to control, humiliate, and make the Other give up and submit. The most worrisome is that this colonial, religious, and State violence, perpetrated on a grand scale, continues to penetrate our intimate sphere (or is it the other way around?). I’ve inhabited many worlds—the world of drugs, prostitution—worked on reservations and villages up north, travelled the Americas and Europe. The harsh living conditions often felt like getting punched—and sometimes those punches were very real, like that one from a stranger in the street that time. Despite everything, I’ve experienced great moments of rapture in the face of this world’s shape-shifting reality. Nevertheless, the history of violence towards women in our societies is taboo, tucked into some kind of blind spot. While recently the tide has begun to turn, the statistics of female victims of violence would overshadow those of any war.
Translated by Émilie Robertson
[1] The exhibition Oubliées ou disparues: Akonessen, Zitya, Tina, Marie et les autresis at the Musée de la civilisation in Québec City until February 2019. I’d like to thank all the artists involved in that exhibition: Lise Bibeau, who left us in December 2017, Sylvie Bernard, Diane Blacksmith, Hannah Claus, Mariette Manigouche, Nadia Myre, Annette Nolett, and Diane Robertson. This project was made possible by the support of La Boîte Rouge Vif, which coordinated the exhibition’s cross-Canada tour and created a cultural mediation kit that contributed to a better understanding of these social issues by allowing each to become an influential actor in order to inform, raise awareness and deconstruct prejudices stemming from intercultural relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada. La Boîte Rouge Vif is an Indigenous non-profit organization founded in 1998. The exhibition tour and the mediation kit were financed by Heritage Canada’s Museums Assistance Program, the National Indian Brotherhood Trust Fund, the Canadian Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec and the Secrétariat à la condition féminine. [2] With the exception of April 13 and 29, the dates in this text correspond to a disappearance or murder. To our stolen sisters: Marilyn Rose Munroe, 41; Shannon Alexander, 17; Maisy Marie Odjick, 16; Rowena Mae Sharpe, 38; and all the others.Sylvie Paré is a Huron-Wendat Métis artist. She holds a doctorate in adult education (specialty in museum education) and a master’s degree in museology from the Université de Montréal. She has been curator of contemporary Indigenous art at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. She received a grant from the Millennium Arts Fund of the Canada Council for the Arts for La chaîne d’alliance,a work inspired by her Huron-Wendat and European heritage. As guest curator, museographer, and artist, she organized the exhibition Oubliées ou disparues: Akonessen, Zytia, Tina, Marie et les autresat the Maison de la culture Frontenac in 2015; the exhibition is continuing at the Musée de la civilisation in Quebec City until February 2019.
CREDITS
Guest editors
Nadia Myre et Jean-Philippe Uzel
Editorial coordinator
Véronique Leblanc
Administrative coordinators
Sébastien Dulude, Zéa Beaulieu April
Editorial committee
Sébastien Dulude, Brigitte Faivre-Duboz, Kevin Lambert, Véronique Leblanc
English translation
Käthe Roth
French translation
Luba Markovskaia
Proofreaders
Véronique Leblanc, Daoud Najm
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Nazik Dakkach
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