yrtzjmnz7's review against another edition
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.5
Despite it being a little less than 130 pages, this was really informative. It was also really hard to read, so probably not something to rush through. A great introduction to the issue that can serve as a gateway into further reading.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Rape and Violence
casey_robertson's review against another edition
5.0
Absolutely devastating. Like The Iguala 43, Sergio González Rodríguez' unapologetic investigation into the corruption within the Mexican government - and their ties to US institutions - results in a jaw-dropping account of systemic violence that the powers that be would prefer dissolved into a collective amnesia.
touchingfeeling's review against another edition
3.0
The Femicide Machine is a short, sharp, and dense contextualization of femicide in Mexico framed within neoliberal policies of Latin America and the USA, by novelist, journalist, political force, and PhD Candidate Sergio González Rodríguez who began his femicide investigations in Ciudad Juárez in 1996.
González Rodríguez focuses on the life of femicide as part of a connected network between neoliberal policy, drug cartels, the complicity of governments, and the consequences of that interplay on the transborder town of Ciudad Juárez. Femicide is the gendered killing of women because they are women often accompanied by sexual assault. The femicide machine is a fluid, disembodied assemblage that, in order to reproduce, is constantly multiplying and changing based on whatever it is feeding off of, like a Serres-ian parasite, making it difficult to manage or fight. In short, it is composed of violence and is “inscribed within a particular structure of the Neo-Fordist economy”. It is difficult to define what it is, and as such, González Rodríguez is concerned with what it does and how it is able to do so —with unlimited assistance of governments that depend on it and thus create indifference and amnesia in their people. He notes in a BookForum interview,
“[the machine] refers to a whole system of relations between power and people that operates through economic, political, social, and cultural dimensions. It is an interconnected system that influences reality through abstract patterns and designed practices in order to achieve specific objectives: gain, productivity, and control. This is the logic of the new global order.”
The effects of the logic of the new global order on on Ciudad Juárez are well defined in The Femicide Machine The book provides a history of Ciudad Juárez, its maquila (manufacturing assembly) workforce boom in the 1950s and the simultaneous rise in poverty and violence. The government did nothing to account for this growth and all basic social and health services could do was decline as more people needed them. More people kept migrating in search for work, and in search of crossing over to the USA. In turn, the Ciudad Juárez/El Paso border became of the most busy human transit nodes in the world. The difference of this transborder is staggering: Ciudad Juárez is one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico and El Paso, Texas, is stated to be the second safest city in the USA. How can this be? How do the governing bodies work together to create such a divide? How does the US ideology penetrate the Mexican multitude? Little is mentioned of religion’s role in the femicide machine, and I’m curious in what ways it relies, because it must, on Catholicism. Mexico is one of the most Catholic countries in the world.
When the legal workforce in Ciudad Juárez declined after the 2008 crisis it did not stop migration into the city, increased an illegal workforce, and amplified violence. Although the concept of illegal work needs to be questioned since the police force and the state depend on and work with many of the powerful drug cartels. This complicity is convenient in its efficacy to dismiss the systemic and systematic violence against women in the region, which finally reached public criticism in 1993. Statistics are sketchy to total how many hundreds of women have been victims of femicide because no one is able to systematically keep track. When a group of scholars concerned with violence against women wanted to set up a comprehensive investigate structure for each missing woman the authorities refused to put it into practice. González Rodríguez makes clear there is no justice for the women and for those that try to expose the tragedies. The Epilogue, “Instructions for taking Textual Photographs” is a reconstructed story based on a femicide victim, Lilia Alejandra Garcia Andrade, from the point of view of her mother who in the end is also killed as she fights for femicido justice. That section and the following "textual photographs" were the most evocative and clearly where the author shines —in experimenting with form and style
González Rodríguez focuses on the life of femicide as part of a connected network between neoliberal policy, drug cartels, the complicity of governments, and the consequences of that interplay on the transborder town of Ciudad Juárez. Femicide is the gendered killing of women because they are women often accompanied by sexual assault. The femicide machine is a fluid, disembodied assemblage that, in order to reproduce, is constantly multiplying and changing based on whatever it is feeding off of, like a Serres-ian parasite, making it difficult to manage or fight. In short, it is composed of violence and is “inscribed within a particular structure of the Neo-Fordist economy”. It is difficult to define what it is, and as such, González Rodríguez is concerned with what it does and how it is able to do so —with unlimited assistance of governments that depend on it and thus create indifference and amnesia in their people. He notes in a BookForum interview,
“[the machine] refers to a whole system of relations between power and people that operates through economic, political, social, and cultural dimensions. It is an interconnected system that influences reality through abstract patterns and designed practices in order to achieve specific objectives: gain, productivity, and control. This is the logic of the new global order.”
The effects of the logic of the new global order on on Ciudad Juárez are well defined in The Femicide Machine The book provides a history of Ciudad Juárez, its maquila (manufacturing assembly) workforce boom in the 1950s and the simultaneous rise in poverty and violence. The government did nothing to account for this growth and all basic social and health services could do was decline as more people needed them. More people kept migrating in search for work, and in search of crossing over to the USA. In turn, the Ciudad Juárez/El Paso border became of the most busy human transit nodes in the world. The difference of this transborder is staggering: Ciudad Juárez is one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico and El Paso, Texas, is stated to be the second safest city in the USA. How can this be? How do the governing bodies work together to create such a divide? How does the US ideology penetrate the Mexican multitude? Little is mentioned of religion’s role in the femicide machine, and I’m curious in what ways it relies, because it must, on Catholicism. Mexico is one of the most Catholic countries in the world.
When the legal workforce in Ciudad Juárez declined after the 2008 crisis it did not stop migration into the city, increased an illegal workforce, and amplified violence. Although the concept of illegal work needs to be questioned since the police force and the state depend on and work with many of the powerful drug cartels. This complicity is convenient in its efficacy to dismiss the systemic and systematic violence against women in the region, which finally reached public criticism in 1993. Statistics are sketchy to total how many hundreds of women have been victims of femicide because no one is able to systematically keep track. When a group of scholars concerned with violence against women wanted to set up a comprehensive investigate structure for each missing woman the authorities refused to put it into practice. González Rodríguez makes clear there is no justice for the women and for those that try to expose the tragedies. The Epilogue, “Instructions for taking Textual Photographs” is a reconstructed story based on a femicide victim, Lilia Alejandra Garcia Andrade, from the point of view of her mother who in the end is also killed as she fights for femicido justice. That section and the following "textual photographs" were the most evocative and clearly where the author shines —in experimenting with form and style
fearandtrembling's review against another edition
5.0
This brief, dense book of theory and analysis is as brutal and harrowing as you'd expect. "Extreme capitalism converges here: plutocratic, corporate, monopolistic, global, speculative, wealth-concentrating, and predatory, founded on military machinations and media control. Ciudad Juárez is the realization of planned speculation that practices on city-slums and on the people there who are considered of little value." A necessary read on life under capitalism and the manifestation of misogynist violence. Will there be more of this, asks the author, in cities all over the world? We all know the answer.
kikiandarrowsfishshelf's review against another edition
3.0
I wanted more from this than it had. But the last part is worth the cost of the book.
piccoline's review against another edition
4.0
An excellent companion to the utterly masterful and life-changing [b:2666|63032|2666|Roberto Bolaño|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1412644327s/63032.jpg|3294830]. This book fleshes out, in dispassionate (and thus all the more damning) prose the structures (economic, legal, illegal, corrupt, disavowed) the have made Ciudad Juarez the machine to produce murders of women. The book finishes with a brief, powerful sketch of the death of one of these victims.
Powerful and urgent.
(Semiotext(e) is, by the way, such a marvelous press. This is part of the same series that produced the excellent [b:Atta|12005936|Atta (Intervention #9)|Jarett Kobek|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1444230617s/12005936.jpg|16970592].)
Powerful and urgent.
(Semiotext(e) is, by the way, such a marvelous press. This is part of the same series that produced the excellent [b:Atta|12005936|Atta (Intervention #9)|Jarett Kobek|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1444230617s/12005936.jpg|16970592].)
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