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Themesicon: navigation pathCyborg Bodiesicon: navigation pathUnruly Bodies
 
Performing the Border (Biemann, Ursula), 1999Writing Desire (Biemann, Ursula), 2000Remote Sensing (Biemann, Ursula)
 
 
 

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«Performing the Border,» «Writing Desire» and «Remote Sensing » she shows, to use Saskia Sassen's words, women as the users of the transnational bridges built by international capital, she shows female bodies as mobile bodies, as bodies in movement in two senses of word: As bodies that are being exploited in a new way due to their new mobility, as well as bodies that are capable of discovering new avenues.

Using the example of the strategic significance of the Mexican border town of Ciuad Juarez, in «Performing the Border» Biemann discusses the fact that this town with its maquiladoras [8] is both a place where women are exploited in an age of transnational high-tech concerns, as well as a space in general for the construction of bodies, genders, identities, nations and borders. Maps, fences, digitalized border landscapes and monitoring technologies visualize the territorial North-South construct and draw parallels between it and Biemann's verbal implication of the body monitoring and surveillance the women are subjected to at their workplaces. An aesthetics of mobility and fluctuation—concepts which characterize the

 

discourse on migration, transnational capital, and industrialization—sets the video's visual rhythm, which is slackened only by intercutting of theoreticians and activists seated and speaking before the camera. The video begins with the camera's view out the window of a moving car; it ends with dancing bodies. In between we see the flux of the female masses streaming into the maquiladora, the morning bus rides, the cars and horsemen in the desert, the exhumation of corpses, the flickering television images, the virtual detonations of mine fields, the ride along the 5000-mile border, the drifting inflatable boat, the captions, the woman washing clothes by hand, the little girl walking down the street: «She is still a girl. Can she find a way to steer through these cultural ruptures?» asks the off-camera female voice. The movement of the camera, film montage, and people can be seen as the aesthetic choreographing of a discourse of migration and capital flow, a discourse that with the help of this common element manages to coordinate the different spheres and thus structurally synchronize them: the rhythm of the assembly line; the flow of the financing capital from the North; the people from the South; the

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