Skip to content
Home/ Border Killers: Neoliberalism, Necropolitics, and Mexican Masculinity
Border Killers: Neoliberalism, Necropolitics, and Mexican Masculinity
Save Ask us
Published
Aug 25, 2026
ISBN-13
9780816557097

Border Killers: Neoliberalism, Necropolitics, and Mexican Masculinity

No customer reviews yet ISBN 9780816557097

Border Killers delves into how recent Mexican creators have reported, analyzed, distended, and refracted the increasingly violent world of neoliberal Mexico, especially its versions of masculinity. By looking to the insights of artists, writers, and filmmakers, Elizabeth Villalobos offers a path for making sense and critiquing very real border violence in contemporary Mexico.

Villalobos focuses on representations of "border killers" in literature, film, and theater. The author develops a metaphor of "maquilization" to describe the mass-production of masculine violence as a result of neoliberalism. The author demonstrates that the killer is an interchangeable cog in a societal factory of violence whose work is to produce dead bodies. By turning to cultural narratives, Villalobos seeks to counter the sensationalistic and stereotyped media depictions of border residents as criminals. The cultural works she examines instead indict the Mexican state and the global economic system for producing agents of violence.

Focusing on both Mexico's northern and southern borders, Border Killers uses Achille Mbembe's concept of necropolitics and various theories of masculinity to argue that contemporary Mexico is home to a form of necropolitical masculinity that has flourished in the neoliberal era and made the exercise of death both profitable and necessary for the functioning of Mexico's state-cartel-corporate governance matrix.

Product details

Pub dateAug 25, 2026
ISBN-100816557098
ISBN-139780816557097
LanguageEnglish
Last updated 2026-09-09 01:27
$40.73
In stock — ships in 24 hours with free tracking
Delivery by Tuesday, October 27, 2026
Qty
Sign in to Add to Saved list
Free delivery on orders over $35.
15-day returns. Any reason.
Secure checkout. We never store card details.

Readers who bought this also bought

More from Caribbean & Latin American
See all
Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Casebook
<em>Casebooks in Criticism</em> offer analytical and interpretive frameworks for understanding key texts in world literature and film. Each casebook reprints documents relating to a work's historical context and reception, presents the best critical studies, and, when possible, features an interview with the author. Accessible and informative to scholars, students, and nonspecialist readers alike, the books in this series provide a wide range of critical and informative commentaries on major texts. <p/>Gabriel García Márquez's <em>One Hundred Years of Solitude</em> is arguably the most important novel in twentieth-century Latin American literature. This Casebook features ten critical articles on García Márquez's great work. Carefully selected from the most important work on the novel over the past three decades, they include pieces by Carlos Fuentes, Iris Zavala, James Higgins, Jean Franco, Michael Wood, and Gene H. Bell-Villada. Among the intriguing aspects of the work discussed are its mythic dimension, its "magical" side, its representations of women, its relationship with past chronicles of exploration and discovery, its portrayals of Western power and imperialism, its astounding diffusion throughout the globe and the media, and its simple truth-telling, its fidelity to the tangled history of Latin America. The book incorporates several theoretical approaches--historical, feminist, postcolonial&#x3b; the first English translation of Fuentes's renowned, oft-cited, eight page meditation on the work&#x3b; a general introduction&#x3b; and a 1982 interview with García Márquez.
$67.24