Left among the Waste: Global Capital, Femicide, and the Materiality of Bodies in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

Abstract: This article examines the overlapping violences of global capitalism and the accumulation of waste in the United States–Mexico borderlands. Based on the femicides in Juarez, Mexico, Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 traces the murders of hundreds of women along the US–Mexico border in the 1990s to the early 2000s. Using feminist new materialist theories, I examine waste as a political and economic byproduct. For Bolaño, the dump is a vibrant and lively space that is a means of resistance and a mode of reclaiming the women and girls left within its bounds. Sites of waste are not used up or dead spaces; treating them as such silences the liveliness of things and the humanity of bodies associated with them. By understanding the complexity of the dump as an animated and sprawling place, I highlight the political, social, and cultural importance of discarded objects and bodies as an essential part of the border narrative.