Sexual and Gendered Necropolitics at the U.S.-Mexico Border: ‘Penetrative Threats’ and (Re)production of Nationhood

This work conducts a discourse analysis of a selection of photographs from El Sueño Americano [the American Dream], a series of 600 photos depicting belongings confiscated at the Mexico-U.S. border, to explore how efforts to secure the United States against (perceived) penetrative and reproductive threats exert gendered and sexual necropolitical regulation, creating threats to migrating people and propagating the dangerous acts which the United States imagines itself as securing against. It points to how borderization to exclude racialized, classed bodies south of the border enmasse is not just implemented by state-brokered policy and subsequent administrative cultures that permit subjecting migrants to physical pain and dehumanizing treatment. Rather, broader participation in sexual and gendered subjugation of migrating people reflect how genderedness, and especially reproductive capabilities, of bodies are an accessible technology through which state-endorsed borderization is taken up by state and nonstate actors alike.