Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-4-2015

Abstract

This paper explores how one incident became a symbol of recognition and awareness while simultaneously one of erasure and violence and how people mobilize to challenge neoliberal state projects and violence. A critical analysis of the media discourse surrounding, the kidnapping and disappearance of 43 male students from Raul Isidro Burgos Escuela rural de Ayotzinapa on September 26, 2014 reveals a symbolic simultaneity of recognition and erasure, which has profound gender implications. This exploration of select media on the #43 students reveals how narratives whose purpose is to inform the public actually minimize epidemic like violence occurring against women by shifting public attention to localized sites and tensions. The medias complicity in drawing uncritical attention to the events surrounding the 43 students bolsters the state's assertion that this violence is random, localized and tied to gang warfare. While families of the 43 have gained unprecedented public attention for the violence enacted against their male relatives, families of women murdered in Mexico have received very little mass public attention. Rather than support the state's project of drawing attention away from a systemic analysis of public violence against the most vulnerable populations of the state-including women, indigenous and mestizo peasants and social activists- the families of the 43 have sought to tie their struggles with those occurring statewide including violence against young women. Their joint struggles have the potential of challenging a neoliberal state seeking to disempower and disappear those who stand in the way of economic and political modernizing initiatives.'

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