Regina Austin (Penn) has posted to SSRN her book chapter, “Women’s Unequal Citizenship at the Border: Lessons from Three Nonfiction Films about the Women of JuÃ¡rez,” forthcoming in Gender Equality: Dimensions of Women’s Equal Citizenship, edited by Linda McClain and Joanna Grossman. Austin is the William A. Schnader Professor of Law and the head of the Program on Documentaries and the Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Here is the abstract of Professor Austin’s chapter:

There is no better illustration of the impact of borders on women’s equal citizenship than the three documentaries reviewed in this essay. All three deal with the femicides that befell the young women of Ciudad JuÃ¡rez, Mexico between 1993 and 2005. Juarez is just across the border from El Paso, Texas. Performing the Border (1999) stimulates the viewer’s imagination regarding the ephemeral nature of borders and their impact on the citizenship of women who live at the intersection of local, regional, national and international legal regimes. SeÃ±orita Extraviada (2001) is an intimate portrait of the victims which illustrates why the private grief of their survivors should have been a cause for public national mourning. Finally, Battle of the Crosses (2005), the work of social scientists, offers a panoramic description of the complicated social terrain on which the JuÃ¡rez femicides occurred and their meaning was fought over. Together, the films suggest how borders are constructed and”performed”through law and law enforcement in ways that jeopardize women’s rights as citizens. The films also show how women in turn challenge law and law enforcement to transcend the limitations of social, political, and economic borders and assert their right to equal citizenship.

Confronted with state intransigence in the face of the murders of dozens of young females, the women of JuÃ¡rez used their traditional female roles as a springboard to political engagement. Overcoming the debilitating effect of class and ethnic marginality, patriarchal mass violence, and governmental corruption and lack of accountability, the women turned back the state’s effort to belittle the murders as private matters and the victims as deserving of their fate. The documentaries together provide a vivid case study that proves the importance of understanding the synthetic quality of borders and their relationship to women’s equal citizenship in a globalizing world where borders can pop up anywhere and at anytime.

The full chapter is available here.

For more on the JuÃ¡rez murders, see prior posts here, here and here. For the important decision by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, see here.

-Bridget Crawford