Boundaries of violence - Julie Sze

This essay examines cultural and literary representations of women and water along the US borders. I analyze Linda Hogan's Solar Storms (1995) and Kem Nunn's Tijuana Straits (2004) to examine how conflicts over water and pollution are gendered in the context of globalization. Through a close textual reading of these novels in their social, political and historical contexts, I argue that water functions as a metaphor for border environmental and justice issues and their gendered dimensions in North America. Water landscapes and the struggles over water provide the backdrop for these texts because of the unique properties of water and environmental pollution to cross boundaries. In crossing political boundaries, water symbolizes the contested politics and the geographic and cultural spaces between nations and communities that hold unequal power. Water also represents complex forms of violence as a result of large-scale economic development, the cultural changes this development ushers in and their gendered effects.
From: International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 9 no. 4 (December 2007)