The murders of the young women in Juarez, though perpetrated by different assailants, bear a similarity: the extreme mutilation of feminized bodies. These mutilations and fragmentations are proliferated throughout media reprentations of the bodies themselves : as photographed pieces and parts (as above), as echoes, as remains of a never witnessed yet constantly staged mutilation. What particularly feminizes these coporeal traces of mutiliation is the ever-present commentary on the fact that these remains come to be through the experience of rape. The floating presence of these rapes, never witnessed in their present moment or attributed to a nameable or singular person, retroactively imagines/produces a prior "whole woman" who was then, according to the popular rape script, entered, violated, and fragmented.

The narrative of rape as violent dissolution of a past whole is (re)constructed, and so, in the dismemberment, we find ourselves haunted by the specter of the whole, the lost woman, the sentimental object of pure interior, never reachable. Similarly, the perpetrator of the action is never found. Local activists navigate this blank space of causality by asking / accusing: Are we ALL the murderers?

The title of this section comes from "La Gallina Degollada" ("The Decapitated Chicken") by Horacio Quiroga, the story of a mother and her perfect four year old daughter, a little girl cherished all the more because of the presence of her four mentally retarded brothers. The fragile status of the daughter's existence takes hold in the minds of her parents -- she is their perfect, successful little child.

One day, the domestic female servant is ordered by the mother to decapitate a chicken for lunch. Later, the daughter is found identically decapitated and spilling blood. The decapitation, assumably performed by the four rejected sons, is not witnessed in the story, and the mother is prevented by her distraught husband from witnessing anything save the tell tale trail of her daughter's blood...

The full-text of "La gallina degollada" is available online.