Performing the Border
A videotape by Ursula Biemann
Thomas 110
"[This] video skillfully captures processes of exploitation in its gendered,
sexualized, and racialized forms, together with a sophisticated
epistemological interrogation about how knowledge of the "border" is
produced, performed, and materialized."
Marjolein van der Veen,
Wellesley College
"...both a criticism of pancapitalism and an attempt in a discursive way to
establish what the possibilities are for individual female lives in this cyborg
world of labour." Yvonne Volkart, n. paradoxa
"To see this film is to see an outrageous scandal that has been swept aside;
fortunately, now it is kept alive in this intriguing documentary."
Lourdes Portillo,
Filmmaker
1999
42 minutes
Switzerland/Mexico
Friday April 5
2:00 P.M
A video essay set in the Mexican-U.S. border town of Ciudad Juarez, where U.S. multinational
corporations assemble electronic and digital equipment just across from El Paso, Texas, this imaginative, experimental work investigates the growing feminization of the global economy and its impact on Mexican women living and working in the area. Looking at the border as both a discursive and material space, the video explores the sexualization of the border region through labor division, prostitution, the expression of female desires in the entertainment industry, and sexual violence in the public sphere. Candid interviews with Mexican women factory and sex workers, as well as activists and journalists, are combined with scripted voiceover analysis, screen text, scenes and sounds recorded on site, and found footage to give new insights into the gendered conditions inscribed by the high-tech industry at its low-wage end.
The publication presents a cultural practice that focuses on gender in cross-border and migration movements and in the geographic context of post-urban zones such as the ones that have developed along the U.S.-Mexican border or on the periphery of Istanbul. AND Jo-Anne Berelowitz's essay in Genders
"A Journey Shared Ursula Biemann's Been There and Back to Nowhere: Gender in Transnational Spaces"
"A provocative plea against the silent blindness to women's plight in a
Mexican border town shaped by trans-national manufacturers. Biemann
uses the camera as a a beam of light to illuminate tacit injustice."
Mara Alper,
Media Artist/Asst. Professor, Ithaca College
