A Talk by Rocío Magaña

A talk by Rocío Magaña

The Latina/o Studies Colloquium and the American Culture Workshop present a talk by Rocío Magaña: Desconocida / Female Unknown: The Violence of Gendered Suffering and the Politics of Migrant Exposure in the Arizona-Mexico Borderscape. Rocío Magaña is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University and a University of Michigan National Center of Institutional Diversity Visiting Scholar in Latino Studies and the Program for American Culture. In this talk, she will discuss how the feminized representation of migrant bodily damage and suffering becomes a privileged trope to mediate and convey border dynamics and generate public concern and action. She will present cultural and media production that portray migrant exposure as exclusively or particularly female and examine the effects of such gendering of migrant death and suffering on rep/production of migrant vulnerability along the Arizona-Mexico boundary and beyond. Through an ethnographic examination of the practices surrounding the production, circulation, and demand for such representations, she outlines the contours of a violent politics of pity that itself reiterates this border?s capacity to exclude, erase and consume subjects by assigning them differential worth, rights, and visibility. Lunch will be served.