Collapsing the Frame: Dead White Women in Nocturnal Animals

by: Jenny Swingler , March 25, 2026

Introduction

There is a scene in the 2016 film Nocturnal Animals, directed by Tom Ford, where a mother and daughter are found murdered in the Chihuahuan Desert in West Texas. The film is an adaptation of the 1993 book Tony and Susan by Austin Wright, and, like the book, it depicts a fiction within a fiction. In the wrap-around story, we follow the relationship between Edward, an aspiring writer played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Susan, an Art History student played by Amy Adams and the subsequent disintegration of their marriage. Crucially, in Ford’s film adaptation, the marriage ends with Susan’s decision to have an abortion. Twenty years later, Susan, now a successful art curator in Los Angeles, receives a copy of Edwards’s novel Nocturnal Animals. The film’s narrative alternates between Susan’s life in California and the novel’s fictional world in West Texas. In Edward’s novel, the character Tony Hastings, also played by Jake Gyllenhaal, drives across the Chihuahuan desert in the dead of night with his wife Laura, played by Isla Fisher, and daughter India, played by Ellie Bamber. They are attacked on the road by a group of men. Laura and India are kidnapped, raped and murdered. Tony is driven by one of the men to a deserted area and dumped. Tony and Sheriff Andes, played by Michael Shannon, go on to avenge the murders, taking the law into their own hands, as they hunt down and kill the perpetrators.

In Women and Death in Film, Television, and News, Joanne Clarke Dillman states that images of the dead female body that ‘litter the cultural landscape of the 2000s’ represent a ‘form of masculine anger and resentment’, and that such images ‘echo and visually intensify a discourse that posits women as disposable and replaceable in the era of neoliberalism and globalization’ (2014: 2). In this essay I propose that the ecology of violence in images of the young dead white woman, such as this scene from Nocturnal Animals, are representative of the violence of empire and are examples of what Richard Dyer describes as the ‘white makings of whiteness within Western culture’ (1997: xxxiii). Beyond the frame of Ford’s scene, where the white female body is sexualised even in death, is the ob skēnē^[1] violence against women working in an emerging tech industry that powers image technology. Specifically, the unsolved murders of hundreds of young Mexican women, many of whom worked in assembly plants that manufacture tech products for companies such as Sony and Samsung, along the Mexican border of the Chihuahuan desert. Whilst Dillman states that images of the dead female body intensify ‘a discourse that posits women as disposable’ (2), the ecology of violence in this scene from Nocturnal Animals is a complex one, as explicit scenes of violence against the white female body are powered by the labour of hundreds of Mexican women whose own deaths are unsolved and invisible.

Whilst what is visible in this image creates imaginaries around bodies and landscapes, what haunts the frame is the spectre of colonialism and extractivism entwined in the image industry. This complex ecology demonstrates how the social impact of images of dead white women shapes our imaginaries as witnesses to the image, whilst erasing the material social conditions for people and communities out of the frame. The poetic writing shared in this essay is taken from my performance piece All These Glowing Girls Will Burn Your Green Lawns Up (2022) https://www.jennyswingler.com/blog.

What my practice instigates is a poetic methodology that conjures what I am terming trans corporeal crossing figures. I borrow the term ‘trans corporeal’ from Stacy Alaimo, whose notion of the ‘trans corporeal’ refers to the ways in which, often through invisible processes at a cellular level, humans are connected to non-human agents in a constant state of negotiation and becoming. Crucially for Alaimo, ‘trans corporeal’ connections between the human organism, sickness, toxins and industry conjure figures that join up how industry and government policy are creating ecologies of violence (Alaimo, 2010). I posit that through my poetic performance practice, a trans corporeal process is ignited that conjures spectral violence beyond the framing of the dead white woman.

 

IT IS GETTING TOO HOT

 

WE MADE TOO MANY GLOWING GIRLS AND NOW OUR GREEN LAWNS ARE BURNING UP.

 

ONE TURNED UP AT A BABY SHOWER IN TEQUITA

AND BURNT THE WHOLE PLACE DOWN

BLUE CONFETTI AFLAME WAS SEEN FLOATING DOWN THE VALLEY.

 

THE FLICK OF THEIR HOT HAIR LEAVES SCARLET WHIP MARKS ON PASSERS BY,

 

THEIR THIGH GAPS LEAVE THE PASSENGER SEATS IN UBERS BRANDED,

AN UPSIDE DOWN HORSEHOE AFLAME.

THAT WILL NEVER BRING LUCK OR WEALTH.

 

ONE SPAN AROUND AT A PARTY DRUNK, LIKE GOOD DRUNK, AND CAUSED A TORNANDO OF FATAL FLAMES.

 

AND THE DEADER THEY ARE, THE HOTTER THEY GET.

UNTIL ALL THAT IS LEFT AT THE END OF THE WORLD,

THIS WORLD,

IS THE END OF A GLOWING GIRL.

 

A BLEACHED ANUS SITTING IN ASH AND SAND, BLINKING IN THE SUN.

SHE IS PART OF A BODY THAT EATS,

BUT THROUGH HER PINKNESS IT LOOKS LIKE NOTHING HAS EVER GONE OUT AND NOTHING HAS EVER GONE IN.

SHE IS A NEW SPECIES.

A SPECIES THAT NO LONGER LIVES IN THE GREEN, YELLOW, RED, BROWN PHASES OF LIFE

 

OR KNEW TOO MUCH THROUGH ALL THOSE WHISPERING BACTERIA IN HER GUTS.

 

SHE IS A CREATURE THAT GLOWS.

 

CORALS BLEACH WHEN IN HOT WATER SO MAYBE SHE IS A SISTER TO THEM. I WONDER WHO TURNED THE HEAT UP ON HER?

 

THEY WILL MAKE NEW MAPS FOR HER.

A PIECE OF LAND FOR A BRILLIANT PIECE OF ASS.

 

THE AMERICAN WEST BECOMES HER.

THE CAVES…HELEN HUNTS THIN PENSIVE LIPS,

THE RIVERS…THE DRIED SPLIT ENDS OF KIRSTEN DUNST’S HAIR.

THE PEAK OF THE HILLS…THE SHARPEST POINT OF PARIS HILTON’S HIP BONE.

 

HIPS SLIM ENOUGH TO DRAG THROUGH A SLIGHTLY OPEN BASEMENT WINDOW AT DAWN.

HIPS SHARP ENOUGH BUT SLIM ENOUGH TO GET HER INTO A TRUNK OF A CAR WITHOUT SCRATCHING THE PAINT WORK.

LIKE NOTHING HAS EVER GONE IN, AND NOTHING HAS EVER COME OUT

 

Playing Dead and Breeding Empire

The Euro-American imaginary has been playing dead in the deserts, forests, lakes, and great plains of North America since the beginning of the settler-colonial project in the fifteenth century. Spurred by a fear of the New World, its favourite playmate to drag around these unknown landscapes has been the young white female corpse. Coinciding with the colonisation and industrialisation of the same wilderness it fears, Western visual culture continuously rehearses the brutalisation and destruction of the white female body in nature. Just out of shot of every scene of a white woman lying dead and murdered in nature, however, is the extraction of natural resources and the exploitation of bodies put to work in that same wilderness. This observation does not negate the very real violence and murder of women and the lack of visibility for certain victims of fatal violence. As Karen Ingala Smith, the co-founder of The Femicide Census in the UK states, despite such violence cutting ‘across all sections of society, across ages, class and ethnicity’, an ‘appalling hierarchy of victims continues into death. It is almost always the young, conventionally attractive, middle-class white woman killed by a stranger, the perfect victim, that makes the front pages’ (Smith 2021). The visibility of the young white woman murdered by a stranger in the news media—and the lack of visibility for women of colour, trans women, and victims of domestic violence—is entwined with a persistent perverse attentiveness to the young dead white woman that we continue to see in contemporary popular culture.

In order to think through how such images are not representations of death but the preservation of white life, I will first expand on Richard Dyer’s idea of ‘white makings of whiteness in Western culture’ (2017: xxxiii). Dyers’ use of ‘white makings [my italics] of whiteness’ suggests that whiteness, as a textual signifier of both a white race and how that race is imagined to be different from other people, requires an active process of construction and preservation. For Dyer specifically, the makings of whiteness as a ‘cultural register’ is built on Christian ideas of embodiment and incarnation:

Black people can be reduced (in white culture) to their bodies and thus to race, but white people are something else that is realised in and yet is not reducible to the corporeal, or racial […] At some point, the embodied something else of whiteness took on a dynamic relation to the physical world, something caught by the ambiguous word ‘spirit’. The white spirit organises white flesh and, in turn, non-white flesh and other material matters: it has enterprise. Imperialism is the key historical form in which that process has been realised. Imperialism displays both the character of enterprise in the white person and its exhilaratingly expansive relationship to the environment (Dyer: 14-15).

This ‘enterprising’ white spirit colonised land and brutalised people not considered to be white through enslavement, whilst the organisation of ‘material matters’ included the expansion of industries based on the extraction of materials specific to certain locales.

Parallel to the construction of whiteness as an ‘enterprising’ force in the physical world, there emerged a fear of the white body as vulnerable to ‘natives’ in unfamiliar lands. This contradiction was exemplified in a consistent othering of native populations as a threat that required domination. Harald Fischer-Tine states that ‘racial stereotyping led colonizers to stigmatize colonized populations as being perpetually close to violent outbursts, unpredictable behaviour and loss of moral restraints’ (2017: 10). Fischer-Tine goes on to describe how the specific threat of ‘native hyper-masculinity’ was perceived as a threat to white women and potentially ‘imperilled the ‘honour’ and hegemony of white men’ (2017: 10). Hysteria over the preservation of the white woman as a vessel for white life in settler colonies can be seen as part of a larger restructuring of sexual politics in Europe starting in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. In Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Federici states that a ‘legal infantilization’ of women unfolded in Europe through ‘a new sexual differentiation of space’:

In France, they [women] lost the right to make contracts or to represent themselves in court, being declared legal ‘imbeciles’. In Italy, they began to appear less frequently in the courts to denounce abuses against them. In Germany, when a middle-class woman became a widow, it became customary to appoint a tutor to manage her affairs … In England too … the presence of women in public began to be frowned upon. English women were discouraged from sitting in front of their homes or staying near their windows (2004: 114)

The domestication and ‘infantilization’ of European women was intensified in European settler communities as the justification for forcing women to remain in the home. This intensification of women’s confinement in the domestic sphere was entwined with the colonial imaginary of the landscapes of the New World as inhospitable and a threat to the fragile white female body—a body that is crucially relied upon to reproduce white life. In Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Val Plumwood describes the emergence of a ‘master category of reason’ where the ‘category of nature’ became a ‘field of multiple exclusion and control, not only of non-humans, but of various groups of humans and aspects of human life which are cast as nature’. Plumwood claims that men and women of all ethnic difference, except the elite white male are cast as occupying a ‘sphere of inferiority, as a lesser form of humanity lacking the full measure of rationality or culture’ (1993: 4). In Sylvia Wynter’s essay Afterword: Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s Woman, Wynter, through her reading of The Tempest, introduces the emerging complexity of the white European female. Wynter states that ‘the primary code of difference’ in the ‘post-medieval expansion into the New World’ is enacted through the ‘relations of enforced dominance and subordination between Miranda, though ‘female’, and Caliban, though ‘male’’, and demonstrates ‘relations in which sex-gender attributes are no longer the primary index of deferent difference, and in which the discourse that erects itself is no longer primarily ‘patriarchal’, but rather ‘monarchical’ in its Western-European, essentially post Christian, post-religious definition’ (1990: 357-358). Wynter states that through absenting ‘Caliban’s Woman’, Miranda becomes the central point of desire, as nowhere in the frame or what Wynter describes as Shakespeare’s ‘system of image making’ is ‘Caliban’s Woman’ mentioned. Whilst Caliban is reduced ‘to a labor machine’ (1990: 360), that empowers ‘Miranda and her mode of physiognomic being, defined by the phylogenetically “idealized” features of straight hair and thin lips is canonized as the “rational” object of desire” as the potential genitrix of a superior mode of human “life,”, that of “good natures”’ the violence wrought upon Caliban’s mate is her erasure from the frame (1990: 360). In the hierarchy of gender and race in Shakespeare’s play, she is absent, a spectral presence off stage.

The control of the sexuality of the wives and daughters of the upper-class white male was, as Anne McClintock describes in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, to ensure the ‘breeding’ of a ‘virile race of empire breeders’ as ‘paramount means for controlling the health and wealth of the male imperial body politic’ (1995: 47). If white world making requires white women to be vessels for white life, it is important for me to lay out why I am concentrating on images of dead white women in nature as an example of white world making.

If Aimé Césair claimed that a ‘civilisation that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilisation’ (1950: 31), I propose that the relentless imagery of the white woman threatened or attacked by a stranger or racial other in a wild landscape is an act of deceit in Western visual culture. As images of the dead white female body in nature form an imaginary around the female body and it’s reproduction of white life as being under threat in wild landscapes, such images obscure the very real and fatal operations of Racial Capitalism (Robinson et al. 1983; Pulido et al. 2016. Gilmore et al. 2022) in the very landscapes that are cast as a threat to white bodies.

 

FACTORIES ARE BUILT ALONG THE MEXICAN BORDER.

THEY SPECIALISE IN MAKING DEVICES THAT GLOW.

IVY LEAGUE MEN KNOW THE FUTURE AND THE PAST HAS ALWAYS BEEN ABOUT PINK ASS.

PINK ASS KEEPS THE BORDERS UP.

PINK ASS IS TAX FREE.

 

THEY BUILD DATA CENTRES IN THE DESERT TO STORE HER GLOWING SISTERS.

THEY SURROUND HER WITH BARBED WIRE.

 

 

THE DATA CENTRES SWEAT WITH NERVES THEY HOLD SO MANY HOT GIRLS.

THEY ARE COOLED WITH FRESH WATER FROM THE COLORADO RIVER,

THE SAND ABSORBS THE SWEAT AND THEY ARE STARTING TO LEARN NEW SONGS. IF YOU STAND ON THE DUNES YOU CAN HEAR THESE SINGING SANDS.

THEY SING THE MOST YOUTUBED SONG EVER

“IS IT TOO LATE NOW TO SAY SORRY? COS I’M- MISSING MORE THAN JUST YOUR BODY.”

 

THERE IS A GIRL WHO GETS THE BUS.

SHE KNOWS GIRLS ARE GOING MISSING AND IT IS NOT SAFE TO WALK THE DESERT ROADS SO SHE TURNS HERSELF INTO A DEER.

 

SHE PASSES THE DATA CENTRES ON HER WAY HOME AND SHOUTS THE NAMES OF THE MISSING THROUGH THE FENCE,

THE DATA CENTRE REPLIES WITH A BLANK HUM.

 

THE SANDS SEE THE GIRL. HER FEET ARE HOOVES AND HER NOSE IS WET AND SHE HAS NO MOTHER. SO THEY CALL HER BAMBI.

EVERYBODY KNOWS BAMBI WAS A GIRL ANYWAY.

 

FROM BAMBI THE SANDS ARE LEARNING OTHER SECRETS ALL THE TIME, OF THE BODIES BEYOND THE GLARE.

THE SANDS SING A SONG WHERE BAMBI HAS WALKED THIS DESERT SO MANY TIMES BEFORE HER HOOVES HAVE ABSORBED THE DEAD.

SHE WALKS THEIR PATH. SHE BECOMES THEM.

 

THEY SEE BAMBI IN A LONG LINE.

SHE IS THERE WITH LOTS OF OTHER WOMEN AND CHILDREN.

THEY ALL LOOK LIKE THEY WERE WAITING FOR SOMETHING.

HER FUR IS MATTED AND MANGEY AND HER NOSE HAS LOST ITS WETNESS. SHE IS HOLDING A LITTLE BOY’S HAND AND

SHE KEEPS PUTTING HIS HAIR INTO A SIDE PARTING, AND HE KEEPS MESSING IT UP AGAIN AND TRYING TO PUT IT THE OTHER WAY.

THERE IS A SURGE IN THE CROWD AND SHE IS LOST.

 

THEY SEE BAMBI WALKED UNSTEADILY OUT OF THE DESERT AND FELL OUT OF A LIMO WITH

A MAN. THEY HAD BEEN AT AN AWARDS CEREMONY.

HE IS LAUGHING AND SWEATING AND BAMBI

IS TRYING TO KEEP HER BALANCE BY HOLDING ONTO THE LIMO DOOR.

SHE’S JUST MANAGING IT.

 

THEY SEE BAMBI IN A FOUR BY FOUR, SHE IS TRYING TO DRIVE HER CHILDREN INTO THE OCEAN.

THERE IS A HELICOPTER CIRCLING AROUND THE CAR AND POLICE JEEPS AND POLICE DUNE BUGGIES

AND A POLICE MAN GETS OUT OF ONE OF THE JEEPS AND PULLS BAMBI OUT OF THE DRIVER’S SEAT.

SHE STANDS WATCHING HER CAR DRIVE INTO THE OCEAN.

 

THEY SEE BAMBI IS BLOWING BLOWING BLOWING BLOWING BLOWING A HUGE KISS AT THE

CHALLENGER SPACE SHUTTLE JUST BEFORE IT BLEW UP.

 

THEY SEE BAMBI WADING DOWN HARRISON AVENUE HOLDING A SMALL DOG IN THE FLOOD, SHE IS WEARING A SPORTS T-SHIRT AND PYJAMA SHORTS SHE TAKES HER FLIP FLOPS OFF AND LETS THEM FLOAT.

THEY SEE BAMBI IS THE GLINT ON A KNIFE IN THE DESERT.

 

Framing of the Dead White Woman in Nature

In Art and Obscenity, Kerstin Mey explores the various and evolving terminology of the term ‘obscene’. The term, which has been linked to the Greek ob skēnē (‘off stage’), as ‘violent acts in Greek theatre were committed away from the eyes of the audience: offstage, behind the scenes,’ evolved into the ‘Latin obscensus in the sixteenth century’ and obscene came to mean something that should be kept ‘out of public view’ (2006: 6). The act of framing certain bodies whilst others are kept ‘out of view’ is explored by Judith Butler in Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (2009). Butler states that one way of posing the question of who “we” are in these times of war [Butler is referring to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq] is by asking whose lives are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned, and whose lives are considered ungrievable’ (2009: 38). Butler’s example of how ‘after the attacks of 9/11, we encountered in the media graphic pictures of those who die, along with their names, their stories and reactions of their families’ whilst there was less ‘public grieving for non-US nationals, and none at all for illegal workers’ (2009: 38) demonstrates how whose image is made visible in the public sphere determines for whom we grieve.

Maggie Nelson also thinks around the frame as a means of giving focus to certain kinds of violence, such as sexual torture, as a means to obscure state violence. Referring to a billboard for torture horror film Captivity (2007), Nelson states that the face of the actress Elisha Cuthbert on the billboard acted ‘as an outsized, daily reminder of the political forces working overtime to normalizse—or in this case, make sexy—that which would have been unthinkable in (publicly acknowledged) American policy not so long ago: namely, torture, especially sexualized torture’ (2012: 61). Nelson, simultaneously in her apprehension of sexualised torture, senses violence beyond the frame of the image. Nelson says ‘when I saw Cuthbert’s face I saw not just the airbrushed image of another blonde actress pretending to be held in captivity and tortured and potentially terminated, but the nameless bodies of all the real brown people being held in captivity and tortured and potentially terminated, and this huge, sexed-up, Aryan, crying face standing in the way, like some gigantic porno scrim’ (2012: 61). For Nelson, the framing of this ‘Aryan, crying face’ is a haunted one that occludes and obscures state violence.

In the frame of the sexualised torture, something else is apprehended, a haunting presence is sensed, despite, as Nelson states, the crying face ‘standing in the way’. This sense of the frame in relation to what is not framed is explored by Eyal Peretz in his thinking around Rembrandt’s painting The Sacrifice of Issac (1635). Peretz thinks of the outside of the frame as a ‘nonspatial’ part of the painting ‘belonging to something we might call the fictional realm of the painting … an outside only made possible by, and in fact to certain extent co-extensive with, the painting itself’ (2017: 4). Peretz goes on to state that this ‘framing mechanism creates borders by introducing a division between … those who are assigned an identity as belonging to a sacrificial community under the power of the paternal mediation of divine orders and, on the other hand, those who do not belong and therefore have no true identity’ (2017: 8). In Peretz’ thinking the frame divides those who belong in the paternal ‘sacrificial community’ and those who have ‘no true identity’. Those who have no ‘true identity’ occupy a ‘fictional’ and ‘nonspatial’ realm.

Nocturnal Animals: Glowing Girls in a Dead Desert

If Hera were the goddess of marriage, fertility and virginity, then Tom Ford, head of men and women’s wear for Gucci and film director, is surely the Hera of our times. Ford has built his empire on creating images of the young, white, virginal female body, as well as on his brand of purifying perfumes—Lost Cherry, Age of Consent, and First Time. In his film Nocturnal Animals, the scene in which a mother and daughter are found dead in the desert, Ford preserves the form of the women as producing vessels, refusing to abject the women’s dead bodies that in reality, would be beginning to decompose under the desert sun.

This is not an image of death, it is an image of white, or pink radiance suspended in a fantasy of death. And what is this fantasy? Let’s not forget that the murder represents the rage against an abortion, and Ford’s image of a mother and daughter entwined is a perverse inversion of the hybrid pregnant body of mother and foetus bound as living organisms —here we have mother and child bound in symbolic death. Or is it really death at all? It is crucial to note that the ‘child’ here is played by a nineteen-year-old Ellie Bamber. To have an actual child’s body, bloated and decomposing, entwined with the mother, a horrific image that is not rare along the border of the Chihuahuan Desert, would be deemed obscene by the racial ideology of white world-making. In Ford’s fantasy, the slim, white, red-headed Ellie Bamber entwined with the slim, white, red-headed Isla Fisher is a Pornhub version of the Ouroboros—the symbol of the snake eating its own tail- a symbol of rebirth, the rebirth of glowing white life. This creature glows, a glow that is akin to Daphne in the Greek myth of Apollo and Daphne. Apollo, infatuated with Daphne, who resists his affection, chases Daphne through the woods, where Daphne pleads for her father, Peneus, the river god, to ‘dissolve my gracious shape, the form that pleased too well!’(Ovid 2013: 23). Peneus turns her into a tree but despite her transformation ‘Apollo loves her still: he leans against the trunk; he feels the heart that beats beneath the new-made bark; within his arms he clasps the branches as if they were human limbs: and his lips kiss the wood, but still it shrinks from his embrace, at which he cries: ‘“But since you cannot be my wife, you’ll be my tree”. All that is left of Daphne is her radiance’ (2013: 23). Although Daphne’s transformation into a tree may seem to save her from Apollo, the ‘radiance’ that is left preserves her as an object of Apollo’s desire. In Ford’s transformation of Ellie Bamber and Isla Fisher into corpses, he, too, has left a glowing radiance. In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar entitled Ellie Bamber on Playing Dead and Getting Naked for Tom Ford, Bamber describes Tom Ford’s dedication to her glowing form:

Tom was very detailed. My legs were spread out and the makeup artist … was putting iridescent lotion, almost like sweat, so my legs were glistening in the sun. He was putting it on my legs and bottom and I was lying there, and the next minute I feel this other pair of hands going back and forth. I turned and it was Tom! … It was great actually, to see a director get that involved (Kosin 2016)

The Ob skēnē of the Scene

What is sustaining this radiant form of white life? The ob skēnē of this scene, itself a digital image, is a digital tech industry built on the exploitation and violation of the very landscape Tom Ford casts as threatening wilderness. Beyond the frame of this scene is the exploitation of the Chihuahuan desert by the digital tech industry, due to its position on the border of Texas and Mexico, and the fatal ecology this has created for young female Mexican women. Las Maquiladoras are factories built to accommodate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a low tax scheme, where technology companies such as Sony, Samsung and Foxconn can fabricate screens for computers, mobile devices and televisions without paying tax. Las Maquiladoras employ mostly women. The employment of women is, in Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller’s study of the factories in Greening the Media, about ‘gender and power’ (2012: 101). Citing a series of interviews conducted by the Centre for Reflection and Action on Labour Issues with Las Maquiladoras employees, Maxwell and Miller describe the extreme precarity of women employees who were ‘subjected to invasive interviews, body searches, and pregnancy tests’ and were ‘exposed to hazardous chemicals and fumes, with little or no training about these hazards or proper protection’ (2012: 98). Whilst Water Benjamin claimed that ‘there is no document of culture that is not also a document of barbarism’ (2003: 392) tracing the barbarism that the digital tech industry subjects its workers to has become increasingly complex as the ‘maquiladora diseases’, described by the Mexican poet Luis Alberto Urrea ‘bloom in wombs and spinal columns’ (1996: 12). Furthermore, an ecology of fatal violence has emerged from the precarity faced by women employed at Las Maquiladoras that has led to kidnap, sexual abuse and murder. The Seattle Times article ‘Disappearing Daughters’ (2020) by Corinne Chin and Erika Shultz stated that since the 1990s, gender-based killings in the city of Juarez have been prevalent. Victims were mostly ‘young women of modest means’, some of whom were discovered with other victims en masse in the Chihuahuan desert.’ The increase in murders of women has been linked to many of the victims working in Las Maquiladoras, as the mainly ‘single young women from small towns’ had ‘moved to Juárez in waves to become wage earners, sometimes facing long and dangerous commutes to work’ (Chin & Shultz 2020). Katherine Pantaleo states in Gendered Violence: An Analysis of the Maquiladora Murders that the gender violence is entwined with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has driven the emergence of Las Maquiladoras (Pantaleo 2010). To return to Joanne Clarke Dillman’s assertion that the image of dead women in popular culture has a ‘disciplining function’ whereby women are made to seem ‘disposable’, I believe it is imperative to widen this ecology of fatal violence to the deaths of the women whose lives have been lost sustaining the image industry, just beyond the frame of its scenes.

Beyond the Scene: Performing ‘Trans Coporeal’ Crossing Figures

If images of white women dead in nature actively distract from and obscure operations of racial capitalism, how can the ob skēnē (off scene) violence be brought to the fore? I propose a poetic performance practice that enacts a material inquiry into the scene. My method is akin to a geographical exploration of the material ecology of peoples, landscapes and industries that exist just out of the frame. Furthermore, guided by media materialists Sean Cubbitt, Jussi Parikka, Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller (Cubitt et al .2014; Maxwell & Miller et al. 2012; Parikka, 2012) I propose that the ob skēnē—that which is out of the scene—constitutes the very tech industries that not only fabricate screens and entertainment devices but also act as deadening forces of extractive industry, exploitative labour and global warming. The visualisation of fragile white life is directly sustained by an industry that endangers all life. Furthermore, my performance practice not only enables what Butler describes as a ‘dislocation of perspective’ (2009) beyond the frame, but it also, crucially, complicates the narrative born from imperialism of the white body as a fragile victim in the wilderness.

 

BAMBI IS EXHAUSTED FROM CARRYING ALL THE DEAD.

THE SANDS SEE SHE HAS BEEN SLEEPING IN THOSE MINES AND GETTING UP AT NIGHT THINKING IT’S DAWN BECAUSE OF ALL THOSE LIGHTS.

THEY SEE BAMBI HAS BEEN NIBBLING ON THOSE LITHIUM BATTERIES BECAUSE HER SLACK SMILE REVEALS CRUMBLING TEETH, WHITE GOLD.

THEY SEE BAMBI HAS BEEN LICKING THE ROCKS. THE ROCKS ARE MADE FROM SEA CRUSTACEANS AND CRABS WHO ONCE LIVED IN THE COLORADO RIVER.

BAMBI THEY SAY, “WE DON’T HAVE ANY WATER FOR YOU, BUT WE USED TO BE ABLE TO SWIM.”

BAMBI LIES DOWN AND PRETENDS TO BE A FOSSIL.

SHE IS NOW MISSING.

BAMBI IS MISSING.

THE SANDS SING. THE CENTRE HUMS.

WEEKS LATER THE SANDS SEE BAMBI LYING IN THE BACK SEAT OF A CAR WITH A MAN NOBODY KNOWS. SHE HAS A HOLE IN HER BREAST.

FLESHY TECTONIC PLATES OPEN AND HER FLESH STARTS TO POUR OUT.

IT SEEPS THROUGH THE CAR DOOR AND WHEN THE FLESH HITS THE TARMAC IT MELTS.

THE DRIVER TURNS TO THE MAN AND HOLLERS:

“CAN’T YOU KEEP YOUR WOMAN TOGETHER?!”

 

BAMBI IS FOUND.

SHE WAS IN A STREAM NEAR THE RIO GRANDE RIVER.

HER FUR MAROON.

 

THIS STREAM FLOWS INTO THE RIVER

AND BAMBI GETS INTO YOUR PIPES.

ALL THAT WHITE GOLD SHE LAPPED INTO SHAPE.

YOU START WAKING UP FROM NIGHTMARES OF YOUR OWN MOTHER HAUNTED.

 

YOU GO TO THE DOCTOR AND TELL THEM OF YOUR MOTHER DREAMS AND THEY LOOK AT YOU AND SAY, “MOTHER DREAMS—YES—ALL DREAMS ARE ESSENTIALLY MOTHER DREAMS.”

AND YOU SAY THIS ONE IS DIFFERENT, THIS ONE IS MURDEROUS.

AND THEY LOOK AT YOU AND SAY, “ALL MOTHER DREAMS ARE ESSENTIALLY MURDEROUS MOTHER DREAMS.’

 

THE DREAMS MEAN YOU ARE UP AT DAWN.

YOU ARE ON YOUR PORCH FACING THE DESERT SKY.

THE STARS STILL OUT AND A BLOODY BLEETING RINGS IN YOUR EARS.

YOU KNOW YOU ARE BLEEDING SOMEWHERE—HOT LIQUID COMES FROM YOUR NOSE AND ASS, AND IT MUST BE BLOOD, SAFE BLOOD.

BLOOD CAN BE TESTED AND MEASURED AND REGULATED WITH A FEW SHORTS TO THE ARM.

IT IS NOT BLOOD.

WHITE GOLD POURS OUT OF YOU.

LIKE GLOWING TENTACLES, IT REACHES THROUGH YOU AND PULLS YOU IN CLOSE.

DIDN’T YOU ALWAYS WANT THIS BURNING GRIP?

 

To lay out how my poetic practice works in relation to the framed scene of Nocturnal Animals, I want to focus on the figure that emerges in my poem Bambi. Bambi is an example of what I am terming a ‘trans corporeal’ crossing body. While walking through the desert sands, she senses the dead and the tech industry’s violent effects on the landscape. Bambi’s hooves absorb the sand, which has already absorbed water from the data centres. This water vibrates to ‘Sorry’ by Justin Bieber, which was once the most-listened-to YouTube song ever (The Hollywood Reporter, 2011). The sand reveals a cascade of material relations that are invisible and shifting. Bambi is a muddy figure, in that she stirs up the material she emerges from and, in doing so, reveals networks that challenge attempts to separate beings from their surroundings, a separation that, as I have discussed, emerged from the ideology of whiteness. Bambi is a figure who lives in a muddy-brown world. I am referring here to Steve Mentz in his chapter ‘Brown’ in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s collection Prismatic Ecologies: Ecotheory beyond Green, and his description of the potentials of ‘thinking brown’. As a ‘colour you cannot see through, brown captures a connecting opacity at the heart of ecological thinking. It comes at us from both sides of the world, the living and the dead’ (Mentz 2013: 193). Furthermore, ‘thinking brown pushes us into hybrid spaces that span living and non-living matter, aesthetic values and biological drives’ (193). Mentz explores the porousness of sand, swamps and faeces through various literary works. In doing so, Mentz states that he intends to emphasise ‘sloppy discomfort’ as brown ‘blends liquid and solid, washing the inhuman fluidity of blue oceans into the purported stability of green land. It is the colour on which all agricultural societies, which is to say, all human societies, depend, no matter how green our environmental fantasies. Down in the muck, life is a brown business’ (194). Muddy figures also create trouble for tech industries that want the violence they inflict to remain spectral and out of the frame.

Donna Haraway posits the potential of ‘making cloudy’ in her book Staying with the Trouble. Haraway states that the word trouble ‘derives from a thirteenth-century French verb meaning ‘to stir up,’ ‘to make cloudy,’ and ‘to disturb’ (2016: 1). Bambi does a kind of troubling and stirring up of the settled terrain of the digital tech industry in the Chihuahuan desert. In my poetic text, I put the figure of Bambi into direct contact with the violence wreaked upon the desert landscape by technology companies such as Samsung, Foxcon and Google. Bambi’s teeth crumble, thirsty she cannot sleep, she is kidnapped, raped and disfigured. This disfiguration turns her into river water. The figure of Bambi is destroyed by a ‘slow violence’. As Rob Nixon states in Slow Violence: Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), the ‘critical task’ of ‘environmental writers’ in tracing the slow violence of environmental destruction is to ‘find the imaginative forms that expose the temporal dissociations that permeate the age of neoliberal globalization’ (2011: 45). The Bambi figure, now turned into river water that has been contaminated, exposes such ‘temporal dissociations’, specifically that of extractive and productive industries that manufacture the very frames that beam the white glowing body into the Western imaginary as separate from the violence of industry. Through absorbing the desert sands into her hooves, the figure of Bambi refigures the ‘temporal and spatial webs of violence’ that operate on a ‘vast scale’ into a crossing body that links femicide with extractive industries along the Mexican border. What the figure of Bambi allows me to do is to track the blood of the digital technology industry and entwine this figure with, as Katherine Pantaleo states in Gendered Violence: An Analysis of the Maquiladora Murders, the murder of young Mexican women with the American Free Trade Agreement, which has driven the emergence of Las Maquiladoras. Crucially, through becoming water, she enters the body of a ‘You’. The ‘You’, through absorbing Bambi, is haunted by dreams and a sickness that they cannot explain. Through the fantastical image of Bambi becoming white gold and tearing through the veins of ‘You’, Bambi’s burning grip instigates a transcorporeal crossing figure entwined in the living, the dead, the landscape, and the violence of industry.

Notes

^[1] I am referring here to the Greek etymology of ob skēnē, where violent acts in Greek Theatre took place ‘off stage’ (Mey, 2007)