Cultural production and ephemeral art: Feminicide and the geography of memory in Ciudad Juarez, 1998-2008

This dissertation examines representations of feminicide victims in documentary film, novels, non-fiction, art, and graffiti and argues that these images express anxiety about they way women traverse and inhabit the geography of Ciudad Juarez, often giving precedence to the idea of the public female body as hypersexualized. In order to reclaim memory of the victims some cultural producers focus on the testimonial form in which victims' families and other activists share their stories or construct informal memorials in the city; these remembrances later appear in works of non-fiction, film, and art, as markers of the process of creating and preserving memory. My dissertation analyzes such works as the documentary Senorita extraviada (2001) by Lourdes Portillo, the non-fiction work Huesos en el desierto (2002) by Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez, and the novel 2666 (2004) by Roberto Bolano, among other cultural expressions, to show how feminicide victims and their families have been marked by and have challenged a pervasive public discourse about female sexuality.;KEYWORDS: Feminicide; femicide; Ciudad Juarez; violence against women; cultural production.