Documenting Gender's Signs: Site, Performance, and the US-Mexico Border in Contemporary Art

Since the 1980s, artwork related to the US/-Mexico border region has employed site-specific and performative elements, collective production, and a distinctive set of images referred to as border semiotics. Rather than taking a purely critical approach to the symbols and interpretations of the US/-Mexico border, two women artists with cross-border identities engage and complicate these signs through their own artistic labor: Ana Teresa Fernández (b. Tamaulipas, 1980) and M. Jenea Sanchez (b. Arizona, 1985). Gender consistently influences both their performances as well as the interpretations of their works; because both artists generate phenomenological encounters and illustrate shifting subject positions to expose hegemonic readings of border imagery. This essay argues that by working to demystify the pervasive image of “woman as landscape” in art of the US/-Mexico border, these two artists implant a feminist approach into this evolving language that questions the repeated “types” of Mexican and cross-border womanhood throughout history and literature. Viewership is central to this argument and to the works in question: each artist purposefully engages a larger collective of interpreting viewers to through documentation as the ultimate collective feminist act