Queer Notes on Border Atrocity

This creative honors thesis begins by posing the following question: how do we write and make art about the U.S.-Mexico borderlands without replicating the visual and literary regimes of representation that render the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts as deathzones and open graves, the borderland queer as non-existent, and border cities like Ciudad Juárez as sites of danger and murder? Split into three chapters, my thesis shapeshifts between three attempts at disarranging the available vocabulary for representing borderland death and borderland violence. The first disarrangement synthesizes the language the academy has used to analyze the interplay between the U.S.-Mexico borderlands’ ecological and political dimensions. It then introduces river water as a methodological framework for approaching thinking and writing about border violence that, I argue, allows for a more relational and intimate understanding of the grief/terror and desire/unruliness embedded into the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The second disarrangement considers the consequences of image-making in the borderlands, clarifying how both the surveillance camera and the filmmaking camera have worked to reproduce a borderlands imaginary of suffering and danger. I develop a brief analysis of the militarized gaze before arguing that the subversive video work of queer borderland artists manages to destabilize hegemonic visual representations of the border. These two research-based and autoethnographic meditations on the ecological and the visual set up the political and aesthetic context through which my third disarrangement, a short experimental film shot in the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez region where I grew up, operates. Ultimately, my film is an honest attempt at locating a liberatory mode of representing borderland life and borderland death––one that does not kill or brutalize but instead does the work of dismantling the settler nation-state borders that wound migrants, borderland inhabitants, and my own queer body.