Girls No Longer Want to Have Fun

Gender Violence and Self-Care in the Mexico City Suburbs

Abstract

Municipal areas such as Tultitlán, Coacalco and Ecatepec, in the State of Mexico, have been, for years now, a corridor for human trafficking, in which the disappearance of women has become constant; in the light of this scenario, inhabitants of these areas narrate their experiences of insecurity and fear, their self-care practices and explain how danger shapes everyday activities.
The narrations by these young ladies displays the way in which violence shapes feminine subjectivities in contexts in which dangers are inevitable and life cannot be put on hold because of them, so the only alternative is to adapt. In these women’s experience, fear is not a distant and random possibility, but a latent and nearby risk, which one escapes every day, no nobody know for how much longer: They all narrate danger situations which, by chance, never took place.
The recreation in particular is part of a discourse on the impossibility of ever being safe anywhere, on the prohibition and blame of the victims; nightlife, occasional and limited, is considered “debauchery” or “irresponsible and immature behavior.”