Professor Lomnitz and Ph.D. candidate Adele Blazquez will talk about Blazquez's paper, which takes the abduction and rape of a woman as a social situation. This paper puts it in perspective with other situations and looks at how these acts of violence are commited locally in order to grasp how they reveal the broader configuration of power.
Blazquez will show that this armed abduction, followed by rape, finally reduced into a conjugal quarrel, appears to be a particularly brutal and vivid version of the “continuum of sexual violence.” Locally apprehended by the category of “theft of woman” ( robo de muchacha ). The radicality of this porosity between armed and domestic violence refers to the singular political economy of Badiraguato, a Mexican commune considered to be “the cradle of drug trafficking” and “the base of the Sinaloa Cartel.”
From a materialist feminist perspective, Blazquez argues that the extreme porosity observed in gendered violence refers to the forms of exploitation and predation that characterizes the insertion into globalized capitalism based on exclusion and isolation. This research is based on an 18-month ethnography conducted between 2013 and 2016 in the main village, the offices of the town hall, and the poppy-producing hamlets spread across the territory.
