War Zone: Bodies, Identities and Femininity in the Global High-Tech Industry


Yvonne Volkart


These notes are about the Swiss artist Ursula Biemann’s videoessay >Performing the Border< (1999) which she presented in preview form at the Second Cyberfeminist International in Rotterdam, March 8-11, 1999.


>I have known Concha for more than five years. Due to the facilities she had in crossing and avoiding US border officials, Concha started to pass wet backs. Her strategies were multiple and variable<.
This is one voice we hear in the video as we see a woman driving her car through the desert. When she became pregnant and was abandoned by her husband, Concha had to look for a new income. She started a service for pregnant women who wanted to give birth to their child in the USA, hoping to get a US passport by these means. If you want to work in the Mexican border city Ciudad Juarez, it seems you have three possibilities as a woman: the maquiladora*, the household and/or prostitution.

In her 40-minute-long videoessay >Performing the Border<, Zurich based artist Ursula Biemann takes Ciudad Juarez as an example to investigate what kind of bodies, identities and genders the global high-tech-industry produces at its low-end. She seems to begin at the same point which Donna Haraway in her >Cyborg Manifesto< identified too fatalistically as the role of Mexican women working in the chip-industry as caught within the cyborg state of being. However it is not Donna Haraway, who Biemann uses as a reference, but the Mexican activist and artist Berta Jottar whose portrait and whose voice we hear at regular intervals in the video. Biemann also refers to the theorist Mark Seltzer, although his name is not mentioned. Seltzers ideas about the entanglement of Fordistic industrialisation and serial killing inspired Ursula Biemanns voiceover to offer further interpretations of the still unsolved brutal serial killings of women which take place continuously in this region.

>Performing the Border< is a polyvocal, visual heterogenous dialogue, in which Biemanns video and film researches from 1998 and 1988**, interviews with local women organisations, TV-clips of the border and of corporations like Philips and police documentaries of the serial killings are intrinsically interwoven. The video itself performs the pattern of performativity of borders, bodies and technologies on a structural level. The esthetics of the videoessay suggests unspokenly, that the border city Ciudad Juarez, beyond its signification as place of exploitation in the context of the new international labour division and high-technology, is also a metaphor for performativity in general (of bodies, genders, identities, nations and capital). This happens primarily by putting a constant set of movements, which are only interrupted sometimes by shots of sitting women who are either being interviewed by Biemann or waiting together in bars or on the streets for their clients. With the camera position facing outwards the video begins in a driving car filming the landscape and it ends with dancing bodies in blue light and a strange electronic sound. In between, there are the movements of the masses of women streaming in the pure and clean maquiladoras, of the bus rides there in the morning, of the cars and horsemen in the desert, of the excavating of the corpses, of the flickering images on TV, of the virtual pictures of the detonations of the mine fields on the US side and of the drive along the borderfence which is 500 kilometers long. There are the movements of a floating rubber dinghy, of white women working in pure white rooms, of the woman washing the laundry by hand, of a girl walking down the street: >She is still a little girl. Can she find a way to steer her through these cultural ruptures?< asks the voiceover. The movements of the camera, of the montages, of the people can be interpreted as the esthethic performance of a so-called >flow discourse<, which connects all these different streams by its common nature of mobility: the rhythm of the assembly line, the flow of the financial capital from the north, of the migrants from the South, of the streaming of female desire as it is articulated in the love songs heard in the morning bus rides, and at least of the production of the female bodies. Everything is effect of these conditions. But >Performing the Border< is more than a visual criticism of pancapitalism. It is also an attempt in a discursive way to show or rather establish what the possibilities are for individual female lives in this cyborg world of labour.


The Body as Battlefield

More than 20 years ago the first of the US-high-tech-corporations settled in this region. On the screen is written: >The maquiladora is a laboratory of deregulation<, and the voiceover comments: >Within short, a new technological culture of repetition, registration and controlling was introduced in the desert city.< Control is an important issue in the video in terms of the regulation and use of female bodies in the production process, in the sex industry, and as victims of murder. However Ursula Biemann does not show the actual technologies of repression nor does she even try to be authentic and convey the intimacy of these womens lives, she lets her interview partners narrate some of their concerns about their individual ways of existence and provides by these means a certain kind of distance and reflection. The productive force of control is expressed by the mention of the regulation of their labor and leisure rhythms, and by creating parallels between these womens lives and the increasing militarisation and mediarisation in which the geographical border itself is re-marked again and again. This equation happens from the very beginning of the tape. While we hear Jottars sentences about the materialisation and naturalisation of the actual US border politics, we see an infrared image of the border and a man on observation duty controlling by surveillance through his binoculars: >In a way the border is always represented as this wound that has to be healed, that has to be closed, that has to be protected from contamination and from disease. [...] Its like a surgical place.< Jottars words regarding geographical landmarks remind us of the discourses of the body, of the idea of the body as a battlefield, of open and closed bodies, and of the female body which is traditionally represented as a wound.

>Gender Matters to Capital< says a running text in the video. Biemann reveals life on the border as a set of total sexualisations. Here, the woman is permanently reinstalled as mute working and sex object, although there are striking shifts in traditional patriarchal patterns (women are now the consumers who the local entertainment industry aims at, and women are the main earners in their families). However, beauty competitions organised by maquiladoras and advertisements of international corporations in which pretty young girls are explicitly looked for, help to renew patriarchal structures under the sign of global capitalism. In >Performing the Border< none of the many girls filmed talks about her situation. It is only the older women, the journalists, the members of women organisations, the activists, the mothers of the missing girls or the fired trade unionist who dare to talk into the camera: >The maquiladora is a strategic point in the national economy of the Mexican state.<

An older interviewed woman who some time ago had to prostitute herself to support the family of her ill brother and who in the meantime is involved in AIDS-prevention, calls the actual closed border >the war<. This >war< dried off the money flowing from the north and cancelled the basis of existence for older women like her. She shows her baby and narrates how she got it: It is a >present< of a young prostitute who is HIV-positive and a heroin addict. Nothing is natural in Ciudad Juarez, everything is under the dictate of the pancapitalistic machine. It is what Jottar said in the beginning: >So you need the crossing of bodies to produce the discursive space of the nation state and also to produce a type of real place as a border.< And this place is always represented as a dangerous place, which may lead to death, if you do not fit to its prohibitions.

Since 1994 more than 140 women have been killed and buried in the desert. Many girls are missing, many victims remain unidentified. Sometimes they only find parts of clothing, sometimes the clothing has been exchanged among the corpses. The pattern of the murders remains always the same: raped, strangled, stabbed. We learn that the nameless murdered women are catalogued by the kind of wounds which led to their deaths and that the local corporations do not want to be named as their employers. Thus, the dead woman from the South becomes the metaphor of this wound which is always represented as an effect of this war zone. But Biemann goes one step forward and argues that the way of female death is being caused by the rhythm of the machines: >The compulsive, repetitive violence of serial killing does not exist without an extreme entanglement between eroticized violence and mass technologies of registration, identification, reduplication and simulation. [...] Serial killing is a form of public violence proper to a machine culture<. A woman who struggles for these murders to be solved and the murderers caught, comments that not all murders are serial killings. Some men take advantage of the dominant serial killing role model and kill the lover who doesnt suit them anymore.

The economic war which dominates this region, is made over the bodies of poor women from the South and can therefore be endlessly naturalised and renewed. The new international labour division is structured as a >technology of gender< (Teresa de Lauretis). It’s for the permanent re-construction of gender difference, for the consolidation of power, subjectivity and identity in a scared world of cyborgs. According to Biemann it is only the line of sexual difference which marks the one fundamental difference being recognised in serial killing. >Performing the Border< refers to the opening up and closing of bodies in the endless cycle of actual high-tech-control-technology, where they are consumed, produced and fixed as female. >We believe technology is good when its shared for the benefit of all<, states the journalist Isabel Velazquez. >Everything should be shared, there is a social price thats not being shared and there is a wealth thats not being shared. Its not enough to pay minimum wage.<


notes:
*maquiladora is the spanish word for golden mills and means the plants for mass production constituted by low-wage
**In 1988, Biemann already researched the conditions under which women work
at the low end of high technology in Mexico for her "border project"
installation where she related the effects to the new international labor
division.

(This text is written for the feminist art magazine n.paradoxa, London, July 1999)