Coloniality and the political economy of gender: Edgework in Juárez City

Abstract

The manner in which urban locations are drawn into the global economy defines their spatial organisation, distribution and utilisation. The relationships that are generated by this process include economic exchanges, racialised dynamics between workers and owners, gendered divisions of labour and the use and abuse of natural resources and infrastructure. These encounters of globalisation are often unequal or awkward and mediated by varying forms of violence, from structural to interpersonal, as these are used to rebalance the terms on which they meet. Using coloniality as an analytical tool, this article discusses the delicate balance of these Western-led encounters. Globalisation has become colonial by embedding hierarchical relationships in the foundations of the modern political economy. Gender identities, whiteness and non-whiteness, developed and underdeveloped are continually redefined, stigmatising certain groups and locations while elevating others on the basis of colonial power dynamics. Through a case study of the US–Mexico border city of Juárez, this article examines ethnographic work in its global context to explore how shame has become attached to male identities in locations of urban marginality. Theorising around the coloniality of urban space production, I discuss how Juárez’s border location has shaped its development though gendered and racialised frictions that are kept in check with violence. A coloniality perspective enables the unpicking of dominant conceptions of industrial cities in the Global South as metonyms for underdevelopment. Using the concept of edgework, I draw out how violence oils the wheels of globalisation to renegotiate damaged identities in contexts of territorial stigma.

Chisi Chako Masimba Mashoma/Kunzi Pakata Sandi Kunzi Ridza: Anthropological Musings on the Coloniality of Dispossession in Africa

“…Arguing that colonialists did not necessarily introduce structuralism, hierarchy, order, and positions in Africa (Bouilly et al, 2016; Bryant, 2011; Gamlin, 2021; Lugones, 2008; Sudarkasa, 1986), this paper contends, in a broad postanthropocentric sense, that even birds that fly know about the existence of hierarchies and positions. Contending that colonialists did not necessarily introduce hierarchical positions in Africa, the paper observes, in a postanthropocentric sense, that even squirrels that take refuge in tall trees know about hierarchies and heights of positions; also, holding that precolonial Africans were not necessarily unaware of hierarchies, the paper argues that even little children know that there should be hierarchies between their feet and heads such that every morning they wake up in such ways that their heads assume higher positions over their feet.…”

“…In other words, without structures, hierarchies, and order, Africans lose their spines-because a spine has to have order, structure, and hierarchy-and this loss of spines makes it impossible to fight for decolonization. To become spineless, in a poststructuralist and postmodernist sense, is to become susceptible to colonization again; yet some versions of decoloniality assume that decolonization is achieved through decentering African power, decentering African hierarchies, decentering African structures, and decentering African order in ways that ironically break African spines (Bryant, 2011;Gamlin, 2021;Lugones, 2008;Quijano, 2000;Salgado et al, 2021). Put in other words, for centuries, colonialists have stolen African structures, they have stolen African order and they have stolen African power by destroying African polities, family structures, and community structures (Posselt, 1935) because they knew that African hierarchies, order, power and structures could be used to resist and even depose colonialism.…”

Introduction: Infrastructural stigma and urban vulnerability

“…The latter include post-colonial and post-Soviet spaces, as well as the ongoing settlercolonial situation in Israel/Palestine. Notably, two contributions examine the 'interchange of Global North and South' (Gamlin, 2021) in Ciudad Jua´rez on the US/ Mexico border, highlighting the relational nature of infrastructural stigma across the North/South divide. Rather than think dichotomously about the Global North/ South, this collection of articles therefore aims to tease out a common theorisation of the relational nature of stigma across urban spaces, one which also takes account of the globally relational geographies of infrastructural violence (cf.…”

“…She argues that the gendered exploitation of labour in this industrial city results in a stigmatisation of masculinity, and develops the notion of 'edgework' to denote a violent means of renegotiating stigmatised identity. She argues that infrastructural inequalities resulting from colonial pasts and globalised presents have become 'vectors for violence', and therefore Jua´rez 'can offer a critical location from which to rethink the awkward urban encounters of globalisation and the coloniality of development as a destination' (Gamlin, 2021). In situating local (direct) violence within wider global configurations of (indirect or structural) violence, Gamlin thus points to the global relationality of infrastructural violence and stigma.…”

Afterword: Citizenship and the politics of (im)material stigma and infrastructure

“…Nonetheless, it is important to recognise that the geopolitical histories and contemporary politics of urban infrastructure differ across the empirical sites, and that (despite limitations in the use of aggregate categories) southern cities are different from northern cities (Schindler, 2017). For example, while Gamlin (2021) is the only article to explicitly address colonisation -exploring how contemporary practices of globalisation are a colonial form of urban space production that violently (re)creates unequal and exclusionary spatialities of resource distributionin fact, colonial legacies are relevant to virtually all the case studies in this special issue. Differentiated citizenship was central to colonial practices, legitimised by stigmatising the (typically racialised) 'native' as inferior and undeserving, and materially plotted onto spatialised landscapes of uneven access to urban infrastructure.…”