Doubling down on the spectacle: the performative (after)lives of feminicide photography in Mexico

This article examines a largely untheorized tactic employed by feminist colectivas in the context of postmortem anti-feminicide mobilizations in Mexico: hyperbolic re-enactments of feminicide photographic scenes. Premised on intense exaggeration and excess, these performative interventions often take place in public spaces ripe with symbolic significance, such as plazas, or in front of government buildings, particularly those related to the administration of justice. The article argues that these re-enactments need to be understood relationally against the dehumanizing logics of display at stake in feminicide press photography. Foregrounding the intersections, differences, and negotiations between normative photographic representations of feminicide and its feminist counter-representations, the article shows how these ‘vigilant repetitions’ reveal the material ramifications of photojournalism of the violence, which hardens and amplifies the state’s regulatory necropolitical framework around feminicide. In so doing, they unsettle existent frames of recognition while raising questions about interdependence and survival through engendering a belated form of what Ariella Azoulay calls civic negotiation.