Lucia Palmer

Peer-Reviewed Articles

“Saving Whiteness: Spectacular Violence and the Politics of White Supremacist Patriarchy”

Journal: Feminist Media Studies, Volume 22
Publication Date: 2022

Abstract
The frequency with which women are subjected to sexual assault along migratory corridors travelling through Mexico and into the United States is a disturbing phenomenon, one that has been spotlighted by human rights watches and organizations in advocating for migrant rights. Frustratingly, this sexual violence has also become a point of focus for nativist groups and militias patrolling the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, leveraged as evidence of the threat of a porous border. This paper investigates intersections in the racialized and gendered processes that reaffirm the United States as a white, patriarchal, and heteronormative national space, spotlighting the ways in which vigilante and nativist groups use spectacles of sexual violence against migrant women as justifications for their surveillance activities. Using images and narratives of migrant women as victims to violent Mexican men, vigilantes and nativist groups objectify and other these women while simultaneously disavowing their own violence and positioning themselves as the privileged occupants and guardians of the United States.

“Teaching Social History Through Locative Media: A Case Study in Austin, Texas”

Co-authors: Cláudia Silva, Valentina Nisi and Joseph Straubhaar
Journal: Disertaciones: Revista de Difusíon Cultural, Volume 12 Issue 1
Publication Date: 2018

Abstract
This paper explores the combination of formal and informal learning coupled with locative media principles; we research the potential of this specific type of media to reinforce and expand learning goals out-of-class time, equip­ping students with lifelong learning attitudes. We report on the findings from and observations on how a class of undergraduate students used locative media for the first time to learn about the effects of spatial segregation in a specific underserved area of Austin, Texas, USA. Students were asked to visit several locations and produce multi­media stories with a focus on the local history. Results from the study show that using locative media is highly effi­cient for learning purposes. Students get to experience the content learned in the classroom in a physical setting, which fosters ‘situated learning’, a theory we used as theoretical framework. Our findings also suggest that rather than local history or history in general, current societal issues with a strong spatial component are more effective in engaging students with the assignment out of the classroom. Hence, segregation and gentrification were found in this study to be useful subjects to be explored and taught through the principles of locative media.

“The Final Girl at the U.S.-Mexico Border: The Politics of Saving and Surviving in ‘Undocumented’ (2010)”

Journal: Postmodern Culture, Volume 28 Issue 1
Publication Date: 2017

Abstract
In the torture porn film “Undocumented” (Chris Peckover, 2010), protagonist Liz is a character descended from Carol J. Clover’s Final Girl–she is forced to watch the torture and murder of her peers while her wit and resilience help her survive. However, the body count surrounding Liz is not composed of sexually active white teenagers, but primarily of Mexican migrants. Using “Undocumented” as a case study, this piece argues for the continuing importance of Clover’s analytical framework and of the Final Girl as a trope, but insists on taking her race, class and nationality into account.

“Rhizomatic Writings on the Wall: Graffiti and Street Art in Cochabamba, Bolivia as Nomadic Visual Politics”

Journal: International Journal of Communication, Volume 11
Publication Date: 2017

Abstract
Politicized graffiti and street art are omnipresent in the Andean city of Cochabamba, Bolivia, invading stratified urban spaces and overwriting official speech and symbols. This article aims to build on scholarship that understands graffiti and street art as a potent creative form of recovering space, building counterpublics, and challenging structures of exclusion and oppression. A Deleuzean rhizomatic approach is used to investigate the visual politics of graffiti and street art as they travel nomadically through Cochabamba, breaching exclusionary public gridded space and legacies of colonialism. Analyzing photographs taken in Cochabamba during 2012 as a case study, this article argues that graffiti and street art subversively write through, between and over dominant images and narratives in the city.

“Melancholia and Memory in Ciudad Juárez: Lourdes Portillo’s ‘Señorita Extraviada’ (2001) and the Communal Mourning of Feminicide”

Journal: Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinema, Volume 14 Issue 3
Publication Date: 2017

Abstract
Engaging with the sizable scholarship on Lourdes Portillo’s 2001 documentary “Señorita Extraviada/Missing Young Woman,” this article investigates the potential of the visual image to create a form of radical melancholy that resists containment by the persistent patriarchal frameworks used to interpret the Juárez feminicide. Taking “Señorita Extraviada” as a historically important feminist text documenting a crucial moment in grassroots women’s activism against gender violence systematically expressed in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, this article discusses the film’s resistant potential. Engaging with Rosa Linda Fregoso’s measured praise and critique of the film, the article proposes other interpretive vantage points to highlight some of Portillo’s affective and abstracting techniques that undermine patriarchal meanings underlying the religious iconography used by grassroots women’s groups to protest the violence and impunity. By putting Fregoso into dialogue with theoretical concepts from Alicia Schmidt Camacho and Laura Marks on memory and melancholia, this article argues for an affective reading of “Señorita Extraviada” as a politicized narrative expressing feminicidal melancholia through depictions of ritual mourning, mobilizations of activism and the production of liminal space between presence and absence, life and death.

“Sluts, Brats, and Sextuplets: The Dangers of Reality Television for Children and Teen Participants”

Journal: Studies in Popular Culture, Volume 36 Issue 1
Publication Date: 2013

Introductory Paragraph
In our mediated world, media representations are an essential part of our relationship with society. Popular culture, especially in the United States, is shaped and constantly redefined by a plethora of images, sounds, words and narratives densely packed with meaning. Our sense of self is intimately intertwined with our surrounding media culture, influencing identities, relationships and perceptions (Holland, 2004).

Book Chapters

“Patriarchal protectors of the national body: Violence, masculinity and gendered constructions of the U.S./Mexico border”

Book Title: “Routledge Companion to Gender, Media and Violence”
Editors: Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge
Publication Date: 2023

Abstract
The US/Mexico border has a long history of vigilantism and racialized and gendered violence, constructed in the U.S. national imaginary through myths of heroism to spectacles of nativist nationalism. Contemporary vigilante groups draw from tropes of Mexican male criminality and aggression and Mexican female hypersexualization and victimhood to justify their actions as patriotic and noble, and to efface their own violent actions. From the Minutemen to more recent vigilante border groups, media representations of their identities and activities characterize them as spectacular, out-of-the-ordinary, as outliers and as localized and small. But are these groups really outside of the norm? Do they deviate from dominant imaginaries of the US/Mexico border and its policing? Official U.S. state media share key themes with vigilante groups, including depictions of agents as patriarchal protectors (brave heroes and noble saviors), Mexican and Central American men as dangerous criminals (particularly in the figure of the savage other) and migrant women and children as abject victims (through human trafficking and/or sexual violence). This triangle of interlocking representations justifies militarized borders, co-opting violence against migrants to mobilize enhanced border securitization and obscure state violence by the United States. These myths and narratives make it clear that nativism is pervasive, rather than marginal, in national imaginaries of the U.S./Mexico border.

“The Geography of Digital Literacy: Mapping Communications Technology Training Programs in Austin, Texas”

Co-authors: Stuart Davis and Julian Etiénne Gomez.
Book Title: “Handbook of Research on Comparative Approaches to the Digital Age Revolution in Europe and the Americas”
Editors: Brasilina Passarelli, Joseph Straubhaar and Aurora Cuevas-Cerveró
Publication Date: 2015

Abstract
Building off of Straubhaar, Spence, Tufecki, and Lentz’s “Inequity in the Technopolis: Race, Class, Gender,” and “The Digital Divide in Austin, TX” (2013), a ten-year study of how social, cultural, and economic tensions in Austin have been buried under the city’s highly lauded model of technology-led development, this chapter discusses three programs that attempt to promote different forms of media and technology training within the city. Adapting a definition of “digital literacy” theorized by Jenkins (2009) that emphasizes competency, capacity and empowerment, we examine how these programs present disparate yet potentially compatible approaches for harnessing the transformational potential of information and communication technologies (ICTs) within underrepresented, marginalized, or at-risk populations.