Dolores Dorantes's Style in Context of Juárez Femicide

Anne Lesley Selcer contextualizes Style, by Dolores Dorantes, translated by Jen Hofer and published in 2016 by Kenning Editions, "within the phenomenon of femicide (or feminicide) in Juárez, Mexico." "Dorantes worked as a journalist in Juárez," writes Selcer, "and wrote Style during a transitional period just after her subsequent exile. The book rebounds life force appropriated by transnational domination and the subsequent chaotic situation of the drug economy there. 'We will blossom fruits of blood. Trees of ash.'" More, from Jacket2:

Saidiya Hartman writes critically on the narratives of “seduction” during slavery. The word is exploited as an “alchemy that shrouds direct forms of violence under the ‘veil of enchanted relations.’” She goes on, “The intimacy of the master and slave purportedly operated as an internal regulator of power and ameliorated the terror indispensible to unlimited domination.”[2] The narrators of Style speak back from this imposed predicament using their own needs, desires, their undead or unkillable libidinal energies to plot the ending. In supernatural anti-lyric, they beg and sexually threaten a male authority, intoning enough power to overcome his life. This can be read as a style of survival and a fighting style which leverages the force of domination like a boomerang.

In Juárez, the femicides are ritualistic, horrific, and accompanied by sexual violence. From Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas: “violence is aggravated under conditions of social exclusion, nonexistent citizenship.” The inextricability of the female body from the aesthetic turns any representation of femicide into potential spectacle. Race intensifies this. Writing on femicide risks redoubled alienation through a tendency to summarize from above without emotion nor stake. I did not feel this way amidst the work of Rita Laura Segato. She refers to the narcos (drug lords) challenging the Mexican government for sovereign power over the territory and population of Juárez. From her essay “Crimes of the Second State”: “The victim’s control of her body space is expropriated. For this reason, it can be said that rape is an act par excellence of Carl Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty: unrestricted control; arbitrary and discretionary sovereign willpower whose condition of possibility is to annihilate equivalent attributions in others and, above all, to eradicate the power of these as alterity indexes or alternative subjectivities.” She goes on, “In the language of feminicide, the female body also signifies territory …