Wounded Objects: Mexican and Global Contexts of Disposable Life

Abstract

This article proposes the concept of the wounded object as an approach to perceptions and representations of disability, wounding, and death, and in particular to ambivalent separations between the living and the dead, the human and the non-human, the singular and the multiple, the identified and the anonymous. My reading is informed by the unequally distributed proliferation of violence in our contemporary global landscape, through which some bodies and populations are designated as more disposable and closer to death than others. The asymmetrical processes of making-disposable take place in regions impacted by war as well as in many settings shaped by racism, economic exploitation and precarity. In this analysis I focus on the juxtaposition of two specific scenarios from Mexico and from the Mexico-US borderlands. The first of these is the statistical display of mortality rates produced by the Mexican government in the COVID-19 era. The second is a lithograph by contemporary artist Linda Lucia Santana, depicting the skull of Joaquín Murrieta, the nineteenth-century outlaw and lynching victim. While the first instance refers to a biopolitical model through which numerical data perform the obscuring of death or damage, the second suggests the enactment of sovereign power through the spectacle of a targeted killing, and thus performs a more explicit encounter with destruction. In each case, the wounded object, a troubled conjuring of past and continuing violence, offers evidence of diverse representations of damaged life, and a framework for the denunciation of both tangible and ephemeral injustices.