Being Killable: Precarization, Violence and Neoliberal Labor in Contemporary Mexico

Over the past two decades, the question of violence in Mexico has occupied a considerable amount of attention in different disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. From the Ciudad Juárez femicides and the harrowing experiences of Central American migrants to the rise of criminal organizations and citizen vulnerability, the experience of violence in neoliberal Mexico has acquired a level of urgency and thus elicited reactive work on the part of scholars in different fields. This paper seeks to systematize the work of scholarship regarding violence in Mexico under the idea of “being killable,” i.e. the dynamics of socialization and subjectification that determine who is the target of violence across the board. Departing from theories of precarization and labor, the paper explores different literary and film works, as well as public interventions and theories, to contend that violence can be read across two axes: the nature of labor in the neoliberal era and the imagination of subjectivity beyond identity.

Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Washington University in Saint Louis. His research centers on the relationship between aesthetics, ideology and cultural institutions in Mexico, with a particular focus on literature and cinema. He is the author of El canon y sus formas. La reinvención de Harold Bloom y sus lecturas hispanoamericanas (2002), Naciones intelectuales. Las fundaciones de la modernidad literaria mexicana (1917-1959) (2009), winner of the LASA Mexico 2010 Humanities Book Award: Intermitencias americanistas. Ensayos académicos y literarios (2004-2009) (2012); and Screening Neoliiberalism. Transforming Mexican Cinema 1988-2012 (2014). He has edited and co-edited nine scholarly collections, the most recent of which are Democracia, Otredad y Melancolía. Roger Bartra ante la crítica (with Mabel Moraña. 2015) and A History of Mexican Literature (with Anna Nogar and José Ramón Ruisánchez, 2016), recently published by Cambridge University Press. He has published over eighty scholarly articles on Mexican literature, culture and film, and on Latin American cultural theory.