UC San Diego

This dissertation argues that the selected literary and filmic texts examined in this study offer critical reconfigurations of the intersecting processes of neoliberal rationalities and the necropolitical order of power along the U.S.-Mexico border. Moreover, the texts examined in this dissertation refocus our attention on critical representations of social abandonment, denationalization, and the production of disposable life under contemporary neoliberal capitalism along the border region. Chapter 1, "The Maquila Complex : Necropolitical Landscapes and the Cartographies of Abandonment," examines the ways in which the film documentaries Maquilapolis : City of Factories (2006) and Señorita Extraviada : Missing Young Women (2001) and the novel Desert Blood : The Juárez Murders (2005) critically articulate and engage with cultural narratives and images of feminicide and anti- female terror. This chapter focuses on the ways in which these seemingly two different film documentaries (re)configure the "conditions of possibility" underwriting various forms of social and political abandonment, exceptionality, and denationalization. Chapter 2, "Reification, Disposability, and Resistance," continues looking at these three same texts in order to investigate the ways in which these distinct genres of Chicana/o cultural production articulate and reconfigure feminicide in relation to social reification, commodity fetishism, and cultural narratives of disposability. This chapter attempts to look at these two texts primarily through the Marxist concept of reification in order draw attention to the ways in which these texts imaginatively represent violence against women beyond immediate circumstances and towards a complex, contradictory narrative that captures the historicized gender, racial, and class dimensions of violence. Chapter 3, "What 'We' Do Abroad : Transnational Adoption and Liberal Internationalism under Contemporary Neoliberalism at the Borderlands," engages with the cultural representations of the neoliberal (b)order along the Mexico-U.S. borderlands. Linking Foucauldian analyses of neoliberal governmentality with critiques of liberal internationalism and transnational adoption, this chapter investigates the ways in which the novel Desert Blood : The Juárez Murders and the film Bordertown (2008) configure neoliberal rationalities embedded in the technologies of governing that produce discourses of blame, mismanaged life, and failed motherhood in relation to U.S. narratives of child rescue and humanitarian interventionism