Melissa W. Wright
Professional Bio
Dr. Wright is a scholar of social justice movements within Mexico and the Mexico-US borderlands, and in the southern Americas. As a critical geographic scholar with foundations in interdisciplinary feminist, critical race, and indigenous studies, Dr. Wright examines how transformational solidarity that merges advocacies for human rights, immigrant well-being, and environmental stewardship form powerful campaigns that have raised significant challenges for the necropolitical convergence of anti-immigrant, extractive economies, and racist governance systems that threaten the well-being of the borderlands beyond the human domain. She has authored foundational pieces in studies of feminicidio and the social movements against it in Mexico and beyond, of social justice campaigns against labor exploitation, and of the formation of solidarity in support of social and ecological diversity in the Mexico-US borderlands. Her work in recent years addresses how transformational solidarity movements throughout the borderlands address the many threats posed by militarization, racism, and capitalist exploitation to borderland life (la vida fronteriza) and to the shared ecologies across the living landscape. Her current research examines how opposition to US border barriers and the policies behind them have gained steam through “border thinking” combined with transformational solidarity movements that prioritize the articulation of social justice with ecological well-being.
Research Interests
Critical Geography, Urban Landscapes, Mexico-US Borderlands, Latin America, Intersectional Feminist and Critical Race Studies, Social Movements, Post-colonial and Decolonial StudiesRelated Materials
Donald Trump’s agenda to build a “big” and “beautiful” border wall continues to raise alarms for anyone concerned with social justice and environmental well-being throughout the Mexico–U.S. borderlands. In this article, I examine how the border wall and its surrounding debates raise multiple issues central to political ecological and human geographic scholarship into governance across the organic spectrum. I focus particularly on a comparison of the different kinds of “border thinking” that frame these debates and that provide synergy for those coalitions dedicated to the preservation of diversity throughout the ecological and social landscapes of the Mexico–U.S. borderlands.
On 26 September 2014, Mexican police forces in Iguala, Guerrero, attacked and abducted four dozen students known as normalistas (student teachers); some were killed on the spot and the rest were never seen again. Within and beyond Mexico, rights activists immediately raised the alarm that the normalistas had joined the country's growing population of “the disappeared,” now numbering more than 28,000 over the last decade. In this article, I draw from a growing scholarship within and beyond critical geography that explores forced disappearance as a set of governing practices that shed insight into contemporary democracies and into struggles for constructing more just worlds. Specifically, I explore how an activist representation of Mexico's normalistas as “missing students” opens up new political possibilities and spatial strategies for fighting state terror and expanding the Mexican public within a repressive neoliberal and global order. I argue that this activism brings to life a counterpublic as protestors declare that if disappearance is “compatible” with democracy, as it appears to be within Mexico, then disappeared subjects demand new spaces of political action. They demand a countertopography where the disappeared citizens of Mexico make their voices heard. Activists demonstrate such connections as they compose countertopographies for counterpublics across the Americas landscape of mass graves, prisons, and draconian political economies, mostly constructed in the name of democracy and on behalf of securing citizens. Understanding how Mexico's activists confront the intransigent problems of state terror, spanning from dictatorships to democracies, offers vital insights for struggles against policies for detaining and disappearing peoples there and elsewhere in these neoliberal times.
On September 26, 2014, Mexico police forces ambushed several student buses from a rural teachers college in southwestern Mexico, killed several and abducted forty-three others. These forty-three have not been seen since and now pertain to the country's bulging numbers of the forcibly disappeared. All of the students were young men studying at a rural teaching college, called a Normal School, and they are typically referred to as “normalistas” (student-teachers). Within a week of this massacre/disappearance, protests erupted across the country to demand their “live return” and to inspire international support of a growing social justice movement. In support of the activism, Mexican artist-activists organized an exhibition and catalog of political posters submitted from around the world. In this paper, I use a critical geographic lens to frame a discussion of these posters, and of the political poster as an activist artform more generally, as I examine them within the many paradoxes that activists navigate in their struggles at the nexus of racism, misogyny, and neoliberal terror.
Social justice struggles across the Americas have, over the last half century, transformed the urban areas of this region into international staging grounds for protesting the global devastation wrought by capitalist exploitation, state terror and social hatred. This paper maintains that there is much to learn for struggles against this triangulation in other parts of the world. In particular, through a discussion of how contemporary activism in Mexico against feminicidio, drug wars and brutal repression draws from a long legacy of protest across the Americas, I seek to illustrate the relevance for other places as people fight a cruel modernity that evolves through terror, profit and hatred. Critical geography has long contributed to exposing these connections and can still deepen its commitments to mapping the landscapes of the growing populations of disappeared and marginalized peoples in Mexico and elsewhere.
In this article, I employ feminist and Marxist tools to expose the struggles over the constant plunder and expansion of global capitalism along Mexico's northern border, specifically in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. In particular, I examine how an official politics – promoted by the Mexican and US governments – for forgetting the economic and social devastation of a transcontinental drug war contributes to the mechanisms for further exploiting the working poor. By combining a feminist focus on the daily struggle of social reproduction with a Marxist emphasis on accumulation by dispossession, I show how this official ‘forgetting’ segues with an international gentrification plan in downtown Ciudad Juárez that seeks to expand the rent gap by denying place, legitimacy and legal status to the working women and their families who have made this border city famous as a hub of global manufacturing. As such, I argue that the social struggles against the official forgetting are struggles against a violent political economy that generates value via a devaluation of the spaces of the working poor, even of the spaces of their literal existence.
Wright, M. (2013). “Feminism, Urban Knowledge and the Killing of Politics.” In Rethinking Feminist Interventions into the Urban, L. Peake and M. Rieker, eds. New York: Routledge.
Wright, M. (2012). “Witnessing, Femicide, and a Politics of the Familiar.” In The Global and the Intimate¸ G. Pratt and V. Rosner, eds. New York: Columbia University Press: 267-288.
This chapter explores the cost of establishing familiarity as the criterion for mobilizing political action in relation to discussions within the human rights literature regarding the political advantages and disadvantages of forming social justice movements around the politics of testimonial witnessing. It considers the interconnection between witnessing and the politics of the familiar by focusing on the femicide movement in northern Mexico that, in the mid-1990s, galvanized political action against the murders and kidnappings of several hundred women and girls within a climate of state-sanctioned impunity. The chapter examines how the need to produce familiarity as the bond binding testifying witnesses to their witnessing public is currently limiting the femicide activists' ability to generate public protest over the escalation of violence against women and the curtailment of citizens' rights in relation to the government's drug war.
THE 2010 ANTIPODE RGS-IBG LECTURE Wars of Interpretations
Since 2006, when Mexico's President declared war against the drug trade, the people of the northern Mexican border city, Ciudad Juárez, have been living through a record-breaking escalation of violence, the occupation of their city by federal troops and police forces, unprecedented human and civil rights violations, and a pervasive experience of fear in public space. These events have occurred simultaneous to a devastating economic crisis. This paper asks the question, how can a feminist and Marxist geographer contribute to an analysis of what is happening in Ciudad Juárez? To address this question, I create a dialogue among activists in northern Mexico and post-structuralist feminist and Marxist positions regarding the meaning of public fear in this city for the city's residents, for Mexico's democracy and for the making of public knowledge about the Mexico–US border.
In 1993, a group of women shocked Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, with the news that dozens of girls and women had been murdered and dumped, like garbage, around the city during the year. As the numbers of murders grew over the years, and as the police forces proved unwilling and unable to find the perpetrators, the protestors became activists. They called the violence and its surrounding impunity “femicide,” and they demanded that the Mexican government, at the local, state, and federal levels, stop the violence and capture the perpetrators. Nearly two decades later, the city’s infamy as a place of femicide is giving way to another terrible reputation as a place of unprecedented drug violence. Since 2006, more than six thousand people have died in the city, as have more than twenty-eight thousand across the country, in relation to the violence associated with the restructuring of the cartels that control the production and distribution of illegal drugs. In response to the public outcry against the violence, the Mexican government has deployed thousands of troops to Ciudad Juárez as part of a military strategy to secure the state against the cartels.
In this essay, I argue that the politics over the meaning of the drug-related murders and femicide must be understood in relation to gendered violence and its use as a tool for securing the state. To that end, I examine the wars over the interpretation of death in northern Mexico through a feminist application of the concept of necropolitics as elaborated by the postcolonial scholar Achille Mbembe. I examine how the wars over the political meaning of death in relation both to femicide and to the events called “drug violence” unfold through a gendering of space, of violence, and of subjectivity. My objective is twofold: first, to demonstrate how the antifemicide movement illustrates the stakes for a democratic Mexican state and its citizens in a context where governing elites argue that the violence devastating Ciudad Juárez is a positive outcome of the government’s war against organized crime; and second, to show how a politics of gender is central to this kind of necropolitics.
Wright, M. (2011). “National Security versus Public Safety: Femicide, Drug Wars and the Mexican State.” In Accumulating Insecurity: A New Politics of Containment. S. Feldman, G. Menon and C. Geisler, editors. Athens: The University of Georgia Press: 285-297.
In 1994, a handful of women and their corresponding civic organizations spearheaded a political movement against violence in northern Mexico. Their initial protests sought to call attention to the violence that stalked women in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, the border city famous for its export-processing maquiladoras, young female workers, and nightclubs. The protestors came to call this violence "femicide" (feminicidio) to refer not only to the crimes but also to the impunity provided by the state and enjoyed by the criminals. Over the next ten years, the antifemicide protestors generated criticism of the Mexican government, at all levels, for its failure to provide public safety to the country's working poor and their families along the border.
The recent emphasis on emotional geographies has turned critical attention to the connections linking affect and social justice. It is hard to imagine this ‘emotional turn’ in the field without much of the ground having been laid by feminist challenges to epistemology, objectivity, rationality, to the gendering of knowledge and the conceptualization of human embodiment, psychic life, subjectivity, and political agency, all in relation to power so often substantiated around a belief that the public and the private are discrete and oppositional domains necessary for organizing social, economic, and political life. In this report, I address the following questions. How can feminist and emotional geography tighten their connections, fuel their shared passions and generate a synergy of scholarship oriented toward activism and progressive change? How can geographies of feeling broaden the path for justice that feminism endeavors to plow? In doing so, I continue my emphasis on research that grounds theoretical discussion with research conducted in activist projects conducted in the name of social justice. I do so as a matter of my own emotional investments — I firmly believe that scholarship must engage with the ways in which people beyond the academy wrestle with the concepts in their daily lives that scholars contemplate, sharpen, and circulate through academic production. So the debates that we scholars so often have with ourselves over the finer points of theory reveal, in my view, their greater significance when they provide tools useful for people who seek to create kinder and more compassionate worlds. Thus, I highlight the scholarship that creates toolkits out of feminist scholarship, emotional geographies, and research on social justice.
Within geography, the flourishing of studies on sexuality indicate the vibrancy of scholarship that approaches sexuality as a nexus of the global and the intimate, where the most private and introspective experiences of embodied self meet with the multiscalar processes of identity and power across the local—global continuum. Certainly, recent publications in sexual, queer and feminist geographies leave no room for doubt that sexuality and gender are axes of multiscalar activity for developing meaning, power and politics in the most personal and public of settings around the world. Consequently, geographers have illustrated how any politics by and in support of those who subvert normative gendered and sexual subjectivities requires geographical imaginations that bridge methodological approaches. In this report, I focus on such geographical imaginaries by examining the efforts of those who work within and across the diverse fields of queer and feminist theories to create synergistic efforts for investigating the everyday life of power, identity and place.
Protest movements offer a rich vernacular for investigating how the connections between social justice and creating political subjects always involve spatial transformations. In this paper, I put Jacques Derrida's contemplations regarding justice as incalculable in conversation with critiques of public witnessing and the role of empathy for catalyzing political action, and I do so to present some speculations over why a social justice movement in northern Mexico has weakened domestically as it has gained steam internationally. The movement has grown since 1993 in response to the violence against women and girls and the surrounding impunity that has made northern Mexico famous as a place of ‘femicide’. By examining these events in relation to the debates on calculating justice and on the politics of witnessing, I hope to add to the growing literature within and beyond geography on the interplay of emotion and social justice politics while illustrating what is at stake in these dynamics for Mexico's democracy and for women's participation in it.
Without a doubt, feminist geography offers extensive discussions on the unifi cation of research and activism, such as by making ‘activism count’ within the academy and by making women’s politics ‘count’ within activist networks (see, for instance, Staeheli et al., 2004; Cope, 2004; Mountz and Hyndman, 2006). These debates reveal feminist geography’s emphasis on approaching the interconnections of academic and activist practice. For Pratt, the objective is ‘working on feminist theory as a geographer and putting feminist theory to work on a concrete struggle’ (Pratt, 2004a: 9). Ruddick (2004) refers to such efforts as approaching activism in its ‘doubled’ sense, by which theory and practice constantly fold into each other. Such doubling rejects, from the outset, the idea that theory and practice are oppositional binaries within either activism or academic practice. Indeed, as Pratt elaborates, ‘Feminist theory is a limited resource if it lacks … the vitality to animate social change. Theorizing within the concrete in the good company of those who have committed their daily life to social change returns some of this vitality’ (Pratt, 2004a: 9). Since feminist geographers typically frame such discussions in dialogue with the other subfi elds of geography as well as with the fi eld of feminist studies, more broadly, feminist geographers offer some of the most complex engagements with the doubled sense of activism found across the discipline. In this report, I present this complexity by knitting together a conversation about the imperatives for and challenges to public scholarship as it materializes through feminist geographic practice. Useful for my endeavor is Cindi Katz’s elaboration of contour line, as a metaphor borrowed from cartography, to track the kinship of theory and practice within the production of knowledge
Wright, M. W. (2008). Craven emotional warriors. Antipode, 40(3), 376-382.
I and many people with whom I work have, once again, been called “ideological crackpots”. I was just sitting down to work on this essay when I decided to peruse the local daily and see what was happening in the opinion pages, only to discover that another right-wing editorialist is taking cheap shots at scholars in women’s studies, in addition to those in ethnic studies and comparative literature, for being, as he writes, “craven emotional warriors” (Rodriguez 2007). In other words, we’re all crazy, and hormonal. We have heard this before.
Wright, M. W. (2007). Urban Geography Plenary Lecture—Femicide, Mother-Activism, And The Geography Of Protest In Northern Mexico1. Urban geography, 28(5), 401-425.
“This silence terrifies me,” said Esther Chávez, the director of a rape crisis center in Ciudad Juárez, the city that borders El Paso, Texas at the Mexico–U.S. divide.3 The silence she refers to is the quiet surrounding the ongoing violence against women in northern Mexico. “No one is protesting,” she said. “There are no press conferences. No marches. It’s like we’re back in 1993.” The year 1993 marks the beginning of what is widely recognized as northern Mexico’s era of femicide (feminicidio)—the killing of women surrounded by impunity (Monárrez Fragoso, 2001). The year also marks the beginnings of the protests that made this violence famous around the world. As I listened to Esther, a woman in her mid-70s, while she lay on her sofa and prepared for another round of chemotherapy, I wondered if I should state the obvious. “You know, Esther,” I said, “no one, anywhere, protests violence against women on a regular basis.” “Well,” she said, “we used to.”
Wright, M. (2006). “Differences That Matter.” In The David Harvey Reader, N. Castree and D. Gregory, editors. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Wright, M. W. (2006). Field Note: Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Women's Studies Quarterly, 34(1/2), 94-97.
Wright, M. W. (2005). Paradoxes, protests and the Mujeres de Negro of northern Mexico. Gender, Place & Culture, 12(3), 277-292.
On November 25, 2002, thousands of people marched through the streets of Mexico City and demanded, in the name of social justice, an end to the violence against women in northern Mexico. ‘Ni Una Más’ (not one more) was their chant and is also the name of their social justice campaign. Their words referred to the hundreds of women and girls who have died violent and brutal deaths in northern Mexico and to the several hundred more who have disappeared over the last ten years. These Ni Una Más marchers, many working with human rights and feminist organizations in Mexico, are protesting against the political disregard and lack of accountability, at all levels of government, in relation to this surging violence against women. And the symbolic leaders of their movement are the Mujeres de Negro (women wearing black), who are based in Chihuahua City. In this article, I examine how the Mujeres de Negro demonstrate how feminist politics so often plays upon the negotiation of spatial paradoxes in order to open new arenas for women's political agency. For while the Mujeres de Negro of northern Mexico are galvanizing an international human rights movement that is challenging political elites, they are also reinforcing many of the traditional prohibitions against women's access to politics and the public sphere. And I explore how the Mujeres de Negro devise a spatial strategy for navigating this paradox in an increasingly dangerous political environment.
Wright, M. (2004). The Private Parts of Public Value: The Regulation of Women Workers in China’s Export-Processing Zones. Going Public: Feminism and the Shifting Boundaries of the Private Sphere, 99-120.
Wright, M. W. (2004). From protests to politics: Sex work, women's worth, and Ciudad Juarez modernity. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 94(2), 369-386.
This paper combines ethnographic research with discourse analysis to discuss how the protests of women sex workers in downtown Ciudad Juárez also represent protests against a larger urban economy that valorizes the disappearance of women from urban space. In Ciudad Juárez today, these disappearances are taking place as women and girls vanish from the publicity regarding progress in the maquiladora industry. The disappearances occur as more women and girls are kidnapped and murdered, and the disappearances occur as the police remove sex workers from the downtowns of border cities long famous for prostitution. While these different types of disappearances are not equivalent—to be denied access to public space is not the same as to be kidnapped and murdered—they are knit together through a discourse deployed by the city's political and corporate elites that equates the removal of women from public space with urban development and industrial progress. By combining ethnographic research with discourse analysis, and Marxist with feminist critique, I am following the lead of several geographers who regard discourses as “sociospatial circuits” that are productive of urban, economic, and cultural landscapes. This approach allows for an analysis of how the women sex workers' efforts to reappear in public space represents a protest, with potential for creating political alliances with other activists, against those invested in generating value from the disappearance of women across the Ciudad Juarez industrial and urban landscape.
Wright, M. W. (2003). Factory daughters and Chinese modernity: a case from Dongguan. Geoforum, 34(3), 291-301.
This article investigates how a group of Hong-Kong Chinese managers of the offshore facilities of a US-based corporation extend their firm’s base in southern China while simultaneously establishing themselves as a new kind of “Chinese” manager. These new managers set out to accomplish what their colleagues in other corporate sites have not been able to do: control the turnover rate of a female labor force, described as sexually tumultuous and hormonally problematic. To control the labor turnover rate, these managers create a strategy for keeping workers “just long enough” before they lose their dexterity and attentiveness as a result of repetitive work. Their strategy relies on a discourse of in loco parentis to justify invasive policies for monitoring workers’ bodily functions and basic mobility inside and outside of the factory. To make this argument, the article combines a Marxian critique of value with post-structuralist theories of discursive subjectivity. The objective is to demonstrate how the negotiation of social identity within the capitalist firm proceeds through the representation of binary cultural and sex differences that reinforce the dichotomies of laborer and manager. However, these binaries unfold in unpredictable and uneven ways that can prove problematic for the capitalist endeavor. The material for this article comes from an ethnographic study of this company’s operations in southern China and in northern Mexico.
Wright, M. W. (2001). Desire and the prosthetics of supervision: a case of maquiladora flexibility. Cultural Anthropology, 16(3), 354-373.
How do strategists' decisions regarding the organization of corporate resources reflect the interplay of power and identity within the firm? And what is at stake for the production of value? These are the questions I address through the presentation of an ethnographic study I conducted in the Asian and Mexican facilities of a multinational firm that produces outboard motors and boats. I draw attention to a particular moment in this corporation's history when a group of US – American engineers try to prohibit corporate support for a new product designed by the company's Hong Kong Chinese engineers. When the Asian engineers defy their American colleagues' directives, they are referred to as ‘Asian spies’ and are threatened with dismissal. In this case, I demonstrate how these nationalist turf-battles inside a corporation are struggles over the form of value itself. They are battles over how the materials of value are recognized as such across a corporation's employees and within the commodities it manufactures.
Wright, M. W. (2001). A manifesto against femicide. Antipode, 33(3), 550-566.
In Ciudad Juárez, a group of feminist activists has established the city's first sexual assault center, called Casa Amiga. They accomplished this feat after launching a social movement on several fronts against the notion that Juarense women are cheap, promiscuous, and not worth efforts to provide them a safe refuge from domestic violence, incest, and rape. The essay explores their efforts as a means for asserting the value of women in Ciudad Juárez, an assertion with reverberating effects in the maquiladora industry that has prospered based on this image of Juarense women. By combining a Marxist critique of value with post-structuralist analyses of the subject, the essay argues that projects such as Casa Amiga represent plausible sites for the organizing of alliances whose objective is to reverse the depreciation of laborers.
Wright, M. (2013). Disposable women and other myths of global capitalism. Routledge.
Everyday, around the world, women who work in the Third World factories of global firms face the idea that they are disposable. Melissa W. Wright explains how this notion proliferates, both within and beyond factory walls, through the telling of a simple story: the myth of the disposable Third World woman. This myth explains how young women workers around the world eventually turn into living forms of waste. Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism follows this myth inside the global factories and surrounding cities in northern Mexico and in southern China, illustrating the crucial role the tale plays in maintaining not just the constant flow of global capital, but the present regime of transnational capitalism. The author also investigates how women challenge the story and its meaning for workers in global firms. These innovative responses illustrate how a politics for confronting global capitalism must include the many creative ways that working people resist its dehumanizing effects.