Melissa W Wright
Biographic Data
| ID | 3635692 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Melissa W Wright |
| GIVEN NAMES | Melissa W |
| FAMILY NAME | Wright |
| SIGNATURE | WRIGHT M W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Pennsylvania State University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 487 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 46 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Raising justice: Political autonomy and a decolonial feminist relandscaping of Mexico City's Reforma
A Big "X" in the Open Wound: A Queer and Decolonial Borderlands Tale of the Chamizal Parklands
The Chamizal parklands at the Mexico–U.S. border emerged from a 1963 treaty signed between the two countries to resolve a century-old territorial dispute. The agreement further reengineered the mighty Rio Grande/Río Bravo river to affix it to the borderline that runs through the Chamizal parklands at the conjoined hearts of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, and El Paso, Texas. Initially designated by Spanish colonizers as a boundary through an Indigenous…
Necropolitics, Border Walls, and a Murder of Jim and Juan Crows in the Americas
Across the Mexico-United States borderlands, overlapping white supremacist and Anglo-nationalist movements are building private walls as monuments to Donald Trump. Numerous social justice activists and ecological stewards have warned that these Trumpist border walls present specific and new threats to social and ecological landscapes, particularly along the riparian sections of the borderlands. To slow their building and even topple these walls, …
Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode At 50
Border Thinking, Borderland Diversity, and Trump's Wall
Donald Trump’s agenda to build a “big” and “beautiful” border wall continues to raise alarms for anyone concerned with social justice and environmental well-being throughout the Mexico–U.S. borderlands. In this article, I examine how the border wall and its surrounding debates raise multiple issues central to political ecological and human geographic scholarship into governance across the organic spectrum. I focus particularly on a comparison of …
Against the Evils of Democracy: Fighting Forced Disappearance and Neoliberal Terror in Mexico
On 26 September 2014, Mexican police forces in Iguala, Guerrero, attacked and abducted four dozen students known as normalistas (student teachers); some were killed on the spot and the rest were never seen again. Within and beyond Mexico, rights activists immediately raised the alarm that the normalistas had joined the country's growing population of “the disappeared,” now numbering more than 28,000 over the last decade. In this article, I draw f…
Shadows of a Sunbelt City: The Environment, Racism, and the Knowledge Economy in Austin
Epistemological Ignorances and Fighting for the Disappeared: Lessons from Mexico
Social justice struggles across the Americas have, over the last half century, transformed the urban areas of this region into international staging grounds for protesting the global devastation wrought by capitalist exploitation, state terror and social hatred. This paper maintains that there is much to learn for struggles against this triangulation in other parts of the world. In particular, through a discussion of how contemporary activism in …
Karen Tracy , Discourse, identity, and social change in the marriage equality debates. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. 224. Hb. £48
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Visualizing a country without a future: Posters for Ayotzinapa, Mexico and struggles against state terror
Global Displacements: The Making of Uneven Development in the Caribbean
How, in the present, have the lands of no one emerged and normalized a mode of organizing the planet according to life and lifelessness?-Katherine McKittrick (2013, 8) He was staring out at the impounded waters of the Artibonite.They stretched off to the east and the west and out of sight among the mountains.From here the amount of land the dam had drowned seemed vast.Still gazing, [Paul] Farmer said, "To understand Russia, to understand Cuba, th…
The Gender, Place and Culture Jan Monk Distinguished Annual Lecture: Gentrification, assassination and forgetting in Mexico: a feminist Marxist tale
In this article, I employ feminist and Marxist tools to expose the struggles over the constant plunder and expansion of global capitalism along Mexico's northern border, specifically in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. In particular, I examine how an official politics - promoted by the Mexican and US governments - for forgetting the economic and social devastation of a transcontinental drug war contributes to the mechanisms for further exploiting the wo…
Feminicidio, Narcoviolence, and Gentrification in Ciudad Juárez: The Feminist Fight
The fight against impunity continues along Mexico's border, especially in the industrial hub of Ciudad Juárez. In the 1990s feminists brought this fight to international attention as they launched a transnational justice movement against feminicidio, the killing of women with impunity. In this paper I create a feminist and Marxist frame to show that there is much to be learned from the fight against feminicidio for the ongoing struggles in a bord…
The 2010 Antipode Rgs‐ibg Lecture Wars of Interpretations
Since 2006, when Mexico's President declared war against the drug trade, the people of the northern Mexican border city, Ciudad Juárez, have been living through a record‐breaking escalation of violence, the occupation of their city by federal troops and police forces, unprecedented human and civil rights violations, and a pervasive experience of fear in public space. These events have occurred simultaneous to a devastating economic crisis. This p…
Necropolitics, Narcopolitics, and Femicide: Gendered Violence on the Mexico-U.S. Border
In 1993, a group of women shocked Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, with the news that dozens of girls and women had been murdered and dumped, like garbage, around the city during the year. As the numbers of murders grew over the years, and as the police forces proved unwilling and unable to find the perpetrators, the protestors became activists. They called the violence and its surrounding impunity "femicide," and they demanded that the Mexican governme…
The Point is to Change it: Geographies of Hope and Survival in an Age of Crisis
Commissioned to celebrate the 40th year of Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, this book evaluates the role of the critical social scientist and how the point of their work is not simply to interpret the world but to change it. Brings together leading critical social scientists to consider the major challenges of our time and what is to be done about them. Applies diagnostic and normative reasoning to momentous issues including the global e…
Introduction: The Point Is To Change It
The title we have chosen for this book, borrowed from one fo Marx's most famous injunctions, is an invitation to think and a provocation to act. We're in the midst of some exceptionally challenging, complex and mementous changes to the global economy, polity, society and ecology
Geography and gender: Feminism and a feeling of justice
The recent emphasis on emotional geographies has turned critical attention to the connections linking affect and social justice. It is hard to imagine this ‘emotional turn’ in the field without much of the ground having been laid by feminist challenges to epistemology, objectivity, rationality, to the gendering of knowledge and the conceptualization of human embodiment, psychic life, subjectivity, and political agency, all in relation to power so…
Gender and geography II: Bridging the gap — feminist, queer, and the geographical imaginary
Within geography, the flourishing of studies on sexuality indicate the vibrancy of scholarship that approaches sexuality as a nexus of the global and the intimate, where the most private and introspective experiences of embodied self meet with the multiscalar processes of identity and power across the local—global continuum. Certainly, recent publications in sexual, queer and feminist geographies leave no room for doubt that sexuality and gender …
The Power of Numbers
Certain numbers have an uncommon hold over us: we regard them as talismanic, iconic, emblematic or otherwise loaded with significance. For Antipode and its readers, two must inevitably command attention in 2009. This August the journal will be 40 years old. Measured in the span of a human life-or at least an affluent Western one-it is now entering middle age. We are thus prompted, willingly or not, to ponder what "turning 40" means for Antipode-t…
Growing up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children's Everyday Lives by Cindi Katz
Cindi Katz , Growing up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children's Everyday Lives . Minneapolis , MN : University of Minnesota Press , 2004 . ISBN 0-8166-4210-9 ( paper ), ISBN 0-8166-4209-5 ( cloth ) In Growing up Global, Cindi Katz provides a lucid and moving assessment of global capitalism in a book focused on the everyday geographies of children's work and play. Indeed, one of the major contributions of the book lies in the clarity of its …
Justice and the Geographies of Moral Protest: Reflections from Mexico
Protest movements offer a rich vernacular for investigating how the connections between social justice and creating political subjects always involve spatial transformations. In this paper, I put Jacques Derrida's contemplations regarding justice as incalculable in conversation with critiques of public witnessing and the role of empathy for catalyzing political action, and I do so to present some speculations over why a social justice movement in…
Gender and geography: Knowledge and activism across the intimately global
In the Name of Democracy
Craven Emotional Warriors
Necropolitics, Narcopolitics, and Femicide: Gendered Violence on the Mexico-U.S. Border
In 1993, a group of women shocked Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, with the news that dozens of girls and women had been murdered and dumped, like garbage, around the city during the year. As the numbers of murders grew over the years, and as the police forces proved unwilling and unable to find the perpetrators, the protestors became activists. They called the violence and its surrounding impunity "femicide," and they demanded that the Mexican governme…
Geography and gender: Feminism and a feeling of justice
The recent emphasis on emotional geographies has turned critical attention to the connections linking affect and social justice. It is hard to imagine this ‘emotional turn’ in the field without much of the ground having been laid by feminist challenges to epistemology, objectivity, rationality, to the gendering of knowledge and the conceptualization of human embodiment, psychic life, subjectivity, and political agency, all in relation to power so…
From Protests to Politics: Sex Work, Women's Worth, and Ciudad Juárez Modernity
This paper combines ethnographic research with discourse analysis to discuss how the protests of women sex workers in downtown Ciudad Juárez also represent protests against a larger urban economy that valorizes the disappearance of women from urban space. In Ciudad Juárez today, these disappearances are taking place as women and girls vanish from the publicity regarding progress in the maquiladora industry. The disappearances occur as more women …
Crossing the Factory Frontier: Gender, Place and Power in the Mexican Maquiladora
A pressing question raised by contemporary feminist theorists is how to conceptualize the intricate relationship between women as social agents and “Women”— an ideological representation of a female subject. Scholars have shown how women must often disavow this Woman in trying to establish their own careers. This article explores one facet of this issue by tracing one woman's journey through a Mexican maquiladora in the hope of demonstrating how …
Gender and geography II: Bridging the gap — feminist, queer, and the geographical imaginary
Within geography, the flourishing of studies on sexuality indicate the vibrancy of scholarship that approaches sexuality as a nexus of the global and the intimate, where the most private and introspective experiences of embodied self meet with the multiscalar processes of identity and power across the local—global continuum. Certainly, recent publications in sexual, queer and feminist geographies leave no room for doubt that sexuality and gender …
The Dialectics of Still Life: Murder, Women, and Maquiladoras
The Gender, Place and Culture Jan Monk Distinguished Annual Lecture: Gentrification, assassination and forgetting in Mexico: a feminist Marxist tale
In this article, I employ feminist and Marxist tools to expose the struggles over the constant plunder and expansion of global capitalism along Mexico's northern border, specifically in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. In particular, I examine how an official politics - promoted by the Mexican and US governments - for forgetting the economic and social devastation of a transcontinental drug war contributes to the mechanisms for further exploiting the wo…
Desire and the Prosthetics of Supervision: A Case of Maquiladora Flexibility
Gender and geography: Knowledge and activism across the intimately global
Urban Geography Plenary Lecture—Femicide, Mother-Activism, And The Geography Of Protest In Northern Mexico
(2007). Urban Geography Plenary Lecture—Femicide, Mother-Activism, And The Geography Of Protest In Northern Mexico1. Urban Geography: Vol. 28, Urban Geography Plenary Lecture, pp. 401-425
Epistemological Ignorances and Fighting for the Disappeared: Lessons from Mexico
Social justice struggles across the Americas have, over the last half century, transformed the urban areas of this region into international staging grounds for protesting the global devastation wrought by capitalist exploitation, state terror and social hatred. This paper maintains that there is much to learn for struggles against this triangulation in other parts of the world. In particular, through a discussion of how contemporary activism in …
Justice and the Geographies of Moral Protest: Reflections from Mexico
Protest movements offer a rich vernacular for investigating how the connections between social justice and creating political subjects always involve spatial transformations. In this paper, I put Jacques Derrida's contemplations regarding justice as incalculable in conversation with critiques of public witnessing and the role of empathy for catalyzing political action, and I do so to present some speculations over why a social justice movement in…
A Manifesto against Femicide
In Ciudad Juárez, a group of feminist activists has established the city's first sexual assault center, called Casa Amiga. They accomplished this feat after launching a social movement on several fronts against the notion that Juarense women are cheap, promiscuous, and not worth efforts to provide them a safe refuge from domestic violence, incest, and rape. The essay explores their efforts as a means for asserting the value of women in Ciudad Juá…
Paradoxes, Protests and the Mujeres de Negro of Northern Mexico
On November 25, 2002, thousands of people marched through the streets of Mexico City and demanded, in the name of social justice, an end to the violence against women in northern Mexico. ‘Ni Una Más’ (not one more) was their chant and is also the name of their social justice campaign. Their words referred to the hundreds of women and girls who have died violent and brutal deaths in northern Mexico and to the several hundred more who have disappea…
Factory daughters and Chinese modernity: A case from Dongguan
Feminicidio, Narcoviolence, and Gentrification in Ciudad Juárez: The Feminist Fight
The fight against impunity continues along Mexico's border, especially in the industrial hub of Ciudad Juárez. In the 1990s feminists brought this fight to international attention as they launched a transnational justice movement against feminicidio, the killing of women with impunity. In this paper I create a feminist and Marxist frame to show that there is much to be learned from the fight against feminicidio for the ongoing struggles in a bord…
Border Thinking, Borderland Diversity, and Trump's Wall
Donald Trump’s agenda to build a “big” and “beautiful” border wall continues to raise alarms for anyone concerned with social justice and environmental well-being throughout the Mexico–U.S. borderlands. In this article, I examine how the border wall and its surrounding debates raise multiple issues central to political ecological and human geographic scholarship into governance across the organic spectrum. I focus particularly on a comparison of …
Feminine Villains, Masculine Heroes, and the Reproduction of Ciudad Juárez
Social Text - 69 (Volume 19, Number 4), Winter 2001
Against the Evils of Democracy: Fighting Forced Disappearance and Neoliberal Terror in Mexico
On 26 September 2014, Mexican police forces in Iguala, Guerrero, attacked and abducted four dozen students known as normalistas (student teachers); some were killed on the spot and the rest were never seen again. Within and beyond Mexico, rights activists immediately raised the alarm that the normalistas had joined the country's growing population of “the disappeared,” now numbering more than 28,000 over the last decade. In this article, I draw f…
Disposable women and other myths of global capitalism
Maquiladora Mestizos and a Feminist Border Politics: Revisiting Anzaldúa
This essay argues that a new, politicized mestiza is emerging within the cultural borderlands of the Mexico-U.S. divide. She works in the upper ranks of the multinational maquiladoras and raises many challenges for a feminist theorization of a new border politics. Through a presentation of research in one maquiladora, the essay demonstrates how understanding the dynamic between metaphorical and material space is vital for imagining a feminist pol…
The 2010 Antipode Rgs‐ibg Lecture Wars of Interpretations
Since 2006, when Mexico's President declared war against the drug trade, the people of the northern Mexican border city, Ciudad Juárez, have been living through a record‐breaking escalation of violence, the occupation of their city by federal troops and police forces, unprecedented human and civil rights violations, and a pervasive experience of fear in public space. These events have occurred simultaneous to a devastating economic crisis. This p…
Home Truths
Introduction: The Point Is To Change It
The title we have chosen for this book, borrowed from one fo Marx's most famous injunctions, is an invitation to think and a provocation to act. We're in the midst of some exceptionally challenging, complex and mementous changes to the global economy, polity, society and ecology
Craven Emotional Warriors
Crossing the Factory Frontier: Gender, Place and Power in the Mexican Maquiladora
A pressing question raised by contemporary feminist theorists is how to conceptualize the intricate relationship between women as social agents and “Women”— an ideological representation of a female subject. Scholars have shown how women must often disavow this Woman in trying to establish their own careers. This article explores one facet of this issue by tracing one woman's journey through a Mexican maquiladora in the hope of demonstrating how …
Maquiladora Mestizas and a Feminist Border Politics: Revisiting Anzald a
Maquiladora Mestizos and a Feminist Border Politics: Revisiting Anzaldúa
This essay argues that a new, politicized mestiza is emerging within the cultural borderlands of the Mexico-U.S. divide. She works in the upper ranks of the multinational maquiladoras and raises many challenges for a feminist theorization of a new border politics. Through a presentation of research in one maquiladora, the essay demonstrates how understanding the dynamic between metaphorical and material space is vital for imagining a feminist pol…
The Dialectics of Still Life: Murder, Women, and Maquiladoras
The Dialectics of Still Life: Murder, Women, and Maquiladoras
A Manifesto against Femicide
In Ciudad Juárez, a group of feminist activists has established the city's first sexual assault center, called Casa Amiga. They accomplished this feat after launching a social movement on several fronts against the notion that Juarense women are cheap, promiscuous, and not worth efforts to provide them a safe refuge from domestic violence, incest, and rape. The essay explores their efforts as a means for asserting the value of women in Ciudad Juá…
Asian Spies, American Motors, and Speculations on the Space - Time of Value
How do strategists' decisions regarding the organization of corporate resources reflect the interplay of power and identity within the firm? And what is at stake for the production of value? These are the questions I address through the presentation of an ethnographic study I conducted in the Asian and Mexican facilities of a multinational firm that produces outboard motors and boats. I draw attention to a particular moment in this corporation's …
Theorizing Space and Time
Feminine Villains, Masculine Heroes, and the Reproduction of Ciudad Juárez
Social Text - 69 (Volume 19, Number 4), Winter 2001
Desire and the Prosthetics of Supervision: A Case of Maquiladora Flexibility
Geographies of Power: Placing Scale
(Andrew Herod and Melissa W. Wright)Part I: Theorizing Scale.Introduction: Theorizing Scale. (Andrew Herod and Melissa W. Wright)1. Beyond Global vs. Local: Economic Politics Outside the Binary Frame. (J. K. Gibson-Graham)2. The Urban as an Object of Study in Global Cities Literatures: Representational Practices and Conceptions of Place and Scale. (Eugene J. McCann) 3. Globalization, the Regulation Approach, and the Politics of Scale. (Kevin Cox)…
The scalar politics of translation
Factory daughters and Chinese modernity: A case from Dongguan
From Protests to Politics: Sex Work, Women's Worth, and Ciudad Juárez Modernity
This paper combines ethnographic research with discourse analysis to discuss how the protests of women sex workers in downtown Ciudad Juárez also represent protests against a larger urban economy that valorizes the disappearance of women from urban space. In Ciudad Juárez today, these disappearances are taking place as women and girls vanish from the publicity regarding progress in the maquiladora industry. The disappearances occur as more women …
Paradoxes, Protests and the Mujeres de Negro of Northern Mexico
On November 25, 2002, thousands of people marched through the streets of Mexico City and demanded, in the name of social justice, an end to the violence against women in northern Mexico. ‘Ni Una Más’ (not one more) was their chant and is also the name of their social justice campaign. Their words referred to the hundreds of women and girls who have died violent and brutal deaths in northern Mexico and to the several hundred more who have disappea…
Home Truths
A Note from the Editors
Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico's Global Factories
Key Words: gendercapitalismethnographyMexico Additional informationNotes on contributorsMelissa W. WrightReviewed by
Disposable women and other myths of global capitalism
Public Women, Profit, and Femicide in Northern Mexico
Research Article| October 01 2006 Public Women, Profit, and Femicide in Northern Mexico Melissa W. Wright Melissa W. Wright Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (2006) 105 (4): 681–698. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-2006-003 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cit…
Urban Geography Plenary Lecture—Femicide, Mother-Activism, And The Geography Of Protest In Northern Mexico
(2007). Urban Geography Plenary Lecture—Femicide, Mother-Activism, And The Geography Of Protest In Northern Mexico1. Urban Geography: Vol. 28, Urban Geography Plenary Lecture, pp. 401-425
Urban Geography Plenary Lecture—Femicide, Mother-Activism, and the Geography of Protest in Northern Mexico
Antipode Online
Gender and geography: Knowledge and activism across the intimately global
In the Name of Democracy
Sociology (31 works) · Political science (27 works) · Law (23 works) · Politics (20 works) · Gender Studies (16 works) · Law (16 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · History (13 works) · Sex work and related issues (12 works)