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- Title
Melancholia and memory in Ciudad Juárez: Lourdes Portillo's Señorita Extraviada/Missing Young Woman (2001) and the communal mourning of feminicide.
- Authors
Palmer, Lucia Mulherin
- Abstract
Engaging with the sizeable scholarship on Lourdes Portillo's 2001 documentary Señorita Extraviada/Missing Young Woman, this article investigates the potential of the visual image to create a form of radical melancholy that resists containment by the persistent patriarchal frameworks used to interpret the Juárez feminicide. Taking Señorita Extraviada as a historically important feminist text documenting a crucial moment in grassroots women's activism against the gender violence systematically expressed in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, this article discusses the film's resistant potential. Engaging with Rosa Linda Fregoso's measured praise and critique of the film, the article proposes other vantage points through which to interpret the film to highlight some of Portillo's affective and abstracting techniques that undermine the patriarchal meanings underlying the religious iconography used by grassroots women's groups to protest the violence and impunity. By putting Fregoso into dialogue with theoretical concepts from Alicia Schmidt Camacho and Laura Marks on memory and melancholia, this article argues for an affective reading of Señorita Extraviada as a politicized narrative expressing feminicidal melancholia through depictions of rituals of mourning, mobilizations of activism and the production of liminal space between presence and absence, life and death.
- Subjects
PORTILLO, Lourdes; MISSING Young Woman (Film); PATRIARCHY in motion pictures; FEMICIDE; FEMINIST theory
- Publication
Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas, 2017, Vol 14, Issue 3, p367
- ISSN
2050-4837
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1386/slac.14.3.367_1