Border Horror: Genre, Geography, Gender and Death on the US-Mexico Border

Abstract

“Border Horror: Genre of Death and Violence on the US-Mexico Border” examines representations of death and violence along the US-Mexico border in film, television, and graphic novels from 1994 to present day. The study introduces border horror as a genre and an analytic category through which to identify, categorize, and respond to representations of death in this highly charged borderland after the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This project studies discourses about violence, dying, death, and the undead with gender, genre, and geography to illuminate the legacies of colonization and conquest that are buried in cultural memory. I argue that an analysis of these images within the border-horror generic category gives us an understanding of how communities living along this space are coded as disposable. Grounded in media studies, my formulation of border horror analyzes societal discourses found elsewhere—in political, academic, artistic, and mainstream texts, as well as in media—that focus on the communities living and dying along the borderlands. The genre thus extends across a range of cultural productions and discourses, from B-movies to academic works, journalistic accounts, and graphic novels. Each chapter of the dissertation highlights the specificity of border horror, focusing on three key generic tropes that link gendered bodies with genre and border geography: personification of the border, conflation of the female body with the geography, and the use of indigenous motifs to explain violence. Through personification, the border is given power over human life; whether intentional or not, the personification of the border and the framing of the border as a murderous, dangerous space inherently shifts the focus away from sociopolitical forces that lead to violence and death. By conflating the female body with the geography, the border itself becomes feminized, and the devious and dangerous border that we see in the previous trope influences the disposability and pain that female bodies—here, especially, the bodies of women of color—endure. I argue that representations of death and violence set on the US-Mexico border, the border-horror genre, is a transgeneric genre, one that exists across existing and recognized genres of cultural productions.