Human security, gendered violence, and women's rights: Lives on the line in the United States-Mexican borderlands

This dissertation explores migrant women's experiences of insecurity and gendered violence in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. Conventional understandings of states; borders, communities, citizenship and identities are increasingly blurred in the borderlands. By drawing on qualitative evidence from in-depth interviews with border women as they strategize to combat, though not always successfully, social, cultural, economic, reproductive, border, and migrant security concerns, women's everyday experiences of insecurity and gendered violence are made visible. This dissertation argues that national, international and global security agendas compromise women's security. This is especially evident in the borderlands where Mexican and U.S. policies are spurred by the quest for national security, and for the U.S. by fears of contra colonization. This dissertation challenges conventional (neo)realist theories of national security which privilege the state, sovereignty and territoriality. Authorized by state-centric masculinist economic paradigms, such theories render women and their experiences invisible in security discourses. This dissertation demonstrates that the concepts of security, violence and rights are decidedly gendered. In writing the concepts of human security and human rights women are invisible. And, in conceptualizing violence, gender as an analytical category is virtually absent. The assumption that violence and militarization are the primary means for ensuring state security is also contested since this frequently renders people insecure. Furthermore, this dissertation challenges the practice of defining the U.S.-Mexican border as territorialized spaces at the expense of human (and women's) security and rights. This dissertation provides a theoretically interdisciplinary analysis which draws on critical, feminist, postmodernist and postcolonialist discourses.