Affect and Necrocapitalism: A Chicana Theory on Misogynist Violence in the US-Mexico Borderlands
摘要
In this chapter, I analyze Latina affect in the US-Mexico borderlands. The chapter explores how racist and misogynist processes that have constrained Latinx emotionality across the history of the Americas, as demonstrated in the previous chapters, congregate in the US-Mexico borderlands on the verge of the new millennium. The chapter discusses the novel Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders, in which Chicana author Alicia Gaspar de Alba (2005) uses fiction to advance a theory about the frequent feminicides that have taken place in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, since the 1990s. The chapter explores how the necrocapitalism that prevails in the US-Mexico borderlands is supported by affects that sexualize, racialize, and label as disposable the labor of Brown and Black women from the so-called Global South. In conversation with theories on necropolitics from the Global South, I define necrocapitalism as a stage of capitalism that adapts principles from past colonial and plantation systems in the Americas to the present demands of neoliberalism. I also argue that necrocapitalism is driven by necrophiliac impulses from slavery and colonialism that evolve into a snuff-porn taste that grants power and authority in the twenty-first century.