Rhetorical contours of violent frames and the production of discursive violence

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I analyze print news coverage concerning the feminicides in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, which some legal advocates-activists position as a crime against humanity. Such a classification underscores the magnitude that one might expect, but fails, to manifest in news coverage. Spanning a 14-year period, I examine 113 print news articles published in the U.S. Combining framing analysis with considerations of loss and grievability, revealed are three frames, their rhetorical dimensions and rhetorical distance effected. One frame, a “city of two faces,” is simultaneously absent and filled with violence that structures understandings of Ciudad Juárez. The oppositional nature of the “faces,” combined with the manifestations of violence, produce “negative valence” that bears on a second frame of “victims, bodies, and murdered women.” Its rhetorical contours provoke discursive violence resulting in double violations against Mexican women and girls of the feminicides. The final frame, “grieving mothers,” is limited in its ability to counteract rhetorical distance fostered by the first two frames. Individually and combined, the frames effect discursive violence, conceived as masking or effacing other forms of violence and/or productive of negative valence, that colludes with other manifestations of violence all the while ignoring U.S. complicity. Recognizing discursive violence for what it is, and the role of media frames, reveals how profoundly audiences could be primed. Media frames can activate audiences so that they view violence as an inevitability in Mexico, view the victims as less than sympathetic, and pity grieving mothers. Therefore, this analysis orients scholars’ attention to the ways that discourse fosters rhetorical distance and advances more concretely the relationship of frames and discursive violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Frames
• discursive violence
• feminicides
• gender
• Juárez

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Correction

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (https://doi.org/10.1080/17404622.2019.1584444)

Notes on contributors

Michelle A. Holling, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Communication at California State University San Marcos. Seeing this essay to publication owes appreciation to Whitney Firth who provided research assistance in the earliest stages of this project and to the late D. Robert DeChaine who offered thoughtful and nuanced feedback and encouragement on a prior iteration of this manuscript. As well, the support and constructive comments offered by the editor and anonymous reviewers helped strengthen this essay. Correspondence for this article to: Michelle A. Holling, Ph.D., Department of Communication, California State University San Marcos, 333 S. Twin Oaks Valley Road, San Marcos, CA 92096, USA. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1. The proper spelling is as presented in text. When quoting from print news articles, I spell the city namesake as presented in print news articles which is often sans an accented “a.”

2. Search terms such as femicides+Juarez, feminicides, murders in Juárez, MX, killing women, border killings. Databases searched include Lexis Nexus, Academic Search Premier, ProQuest, and JSTOR.

3. Search results in four databases yielded news stories from the presses named, including the two regional Texas newspapers about the feminicides. Any omission of other regional newspapers may be attributable to articles that are indexed, digitized, and/or licensing issues. I examine news stories published in print and/or internet due to story length, rather than television news that compresses content into seconds; and, accessibility of content and continued (re)circulation of stories beyond original publication date.

4. The bodies of women and girls have been found in locales such as Lote Bravo in 1995, Lomas de Poleo in 1996, El Campo Algodonero in 2001, and Cristo Negro in 2003. These particular sites garnered the attention of news, documentaries, and the public. Lomas de Poleo and El Campo Algodonero function as memorial sites.

5. Print news coverage was sporadic at best from 1995 to 2000. In 2001 and 2002, a total of 18 news articles of varying lengths were published in each year. Then, in 2003 and 2004, a combined 44 news articles were printed.

6. Addressing the history and development of maquiladoras is beyond the scope of this essay. Various scholars provide discussions of the maquiladora industry, which derives from the Border Industrial Program and gathers strength from the passage of NAFTA (consult DeChaine, 2012; Schmidt Camacho, 2004, 2008; Volk & Schlotterbeck, 2007; Wright, 2001).

7. Only eight of the 113 news articles name the maquiladoras as “Fortune 500 companies,” “American owned” or “U.S. companies.”

8. Approximately 10% of feminicide victims worked at a maquiladora (Gaspar de Alba, 2003). For victims who worked at a maquiladora only then does the maquiladora bear responsibility according to one family activist (Holling, 2014).

9. Scholars studying feminicides do implicate the role of the state in the persistence of feminicides given a culture of impunity (Fregoso & Bejarano, 2010; Gaspar de Alba & Guzmán, 2010b).

10. The “Mexican problem” surfaced in early twentieth century that indexed the racial positioning of Mexican (Americans) within the U.S. national imaginary wrought by economic and political conditions of the period (Holling, 2012, pp. 74–75).

11. Depending on sources consulted, the National Commission on Human Rights in Mexico reports “two thousand women disappeared in Mexico between 1993 and 2003. Other sources say the number of … is over four thousand” (qtd. in Gaspar de Alba, 2010a, pp. 73–74).

12. I borrow from Butler, who explains: “precarity designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (2009, p. 25).

13. Oft-cited theories include a serial killer, satanic cult killings, organ smugglers, snuff film producers, supposed master mind and convicted Abdel Latif Sharif Sharif and “his” gang Los Rebeldes, and a band of bus drivers referred to as Los Choferes.

14. Paralleling this observation is Jiwani’s (2009) analysis of media representations of Aboriginal women, who notes that structural violence, depending on to whom it may be attributed (i.e. governmental actions versus Aboriginal leadership) is neglected. Consequently, Aboriginal women who contend with gendered violence are “blameworthy.”

15. Elsewhere, I elaborate on “scenes of address” in Juárez namely, transnationality; sites of violence committed, challenged or escaped; and homespace that point to the cultural context and climate (Holling, 2014, p. 319).

16. Feminicides is a more precise term that underscores both the violence against Mexican women and the conditions (e.g. impunity, state inaction and malfeasance, and systemic violence) that give way to the violence (Fregoso & Bejarano, 2010; Holling, 2014). Unilateral adoption of “feminicides” would complicate masking forms of violence, and guard against homogenizing the causes and effects of such gendered violence simultaneously allowing for seeing points of convergence and divergence globally.

17. The single exception is Molly Moore (2000b) of Chicago Tribune, who wrote an exposé detailing violence in Juárez. On the second and final day of her expose, Moore provided a “partial list of women murdered” that was culled together from various sources on both sides of the border. Listed from 1997 through 2000 were women’s and girls’ names, ages, and manners of death.

18. Relative to the analysis of the first two frames, the third is comparatively less and indicative of the tertiary importance extended to family members’ subjectivity by news outlets. Mothers are identified by name or gender role in 20 of the 113 stories analyzed.

19. Scholars examined some nongovernmental organizations to understand the ways that mothers use their gendered role as a means of resistance and to protest the disappearances of women and girls in Juárez (Bejarano, 2002; Holling, 2014).

20. See also the work of Gaspar de Alba (2003), who discusses consciousness-raising efforts by several nongovernmental and grassroots organizations, which include participation in rastreos. For their efforts, leader-activists of nongovernmental organizations have been disparaged and publicly criticized.