Tracing violence and cruelty in Mexico’s visual culture. Images of violence and their effects on subjectivity and the social bond

From the beginning of the war against drug trafficking in 2006, the visualisation of violence has become an everyday staple in the Mexican imaginary. Images of violence are present throughout different communication media and in varying degrees of gruesomeness. These images slipped into historically constructed discursive structures that signified and discriminated the other whilst building their own modes of signification and operation, thus creating a visuality sustained in and through violence at the service of a necropower. This visuality was formed from a complex array of words and images weaved into an entangled, self-signifying network where everything constituting the image is constrained to the signifiers that enable them.

To understand the discourses and traces of today’s images of violence in Mexico, this thesis begins with an incursion into some images produced during the Dirty War in the 1960s. This research aims to elaborate on the modes of visualising violence that have been studied across diverse geographies and focuses, in particular, on the effects of visual modalities of violence on subjectivity and the social bond. The theoretical sources used to develop this project—psychoanalytic theory, post-structural philosophy, and visual studies— allow a diverse yet critical and comprehensive view of the subject, the social bond, and their relationship to the images and visuality of violence. Thus, rather than remaining in condemnation of images of violence, this project examines in detail the traces of visual violence in discourses that have enabled the proliferation of violence and, more troubling still, cruelty against historically marginalised and criminalised subjectivities. Following this, the thesis proposes memory and mourning as paths to confront and move the paradigms of representation of violence to create new imaginary and symbolic experiences regarding the lives and deaths of other(s).