Artistic Statement

A Note from the Creator of A Eulogy for Jane Doe

A Eulogy for Jane Doe began as a poetry and art project honoring the lives of hundreds of women whose bodies remain unidentified in the United States and along the US/Mexico border. 

Each year more than 4,000 sets of human remains are found in the United States, and of those about a quarter stay unidentified. While the cause of death sometimes remains unknown, unidentified females—referred to as Jane Does—are often the victims of foul play, and more than likely they were murdered by men—in particularly heinous ways.

Femicide, or the killing of women and girls because of their gender, has been described as murder with sexist motivations, and is tragically an unrecognized epidemic in the United States. Black women, Native American women, undocumented migrant women, and poor women–are disproportionately vulnerable to gender-based violence and femicide.  Black women are almost six times as likely to be murdered than non-Black women. The murder rate of Native American women is ten times the national average and murder is the third leading cause of death for Native women; 67% of these murders are perpetrated by non-Native men. In addition to systematic racism, many women remain unidentified because of misracialization, misgendering, or because of their immigration status.

For A Eulogy for Jane Doe, I retrieved photographs of items and clothing found on unidentified women from FBI and DNA databases. I then commissioned artist Claudia Paraschiv to draw a series of illustrations of the women’s items, which became the inspiration for a series of eulogy poems (written by me and nine other commissioned poets) celebrating the lives of these women.

In part, the seeds of this project began to germinate when I was brainstorming ways I could encourage my students at the University of Arizona to use the literary arts to engage in reflection and conversation on femicide–which is of course a highly sensitive and potentially traumatic topic.  Dawn Wilcox, who created the first national database on femicide in the United States, had been a guest speaker in my class several times. And as she was showing us her database and sharing the names and stories of victims, my heart broke especially for the women who were simply listed as “unidentified.” 

As a writer, I wondered what was the most sacred way to write about women for whom there are so many possible unknowns. Eventually I decided that poetry would lend itself beautifully to this task as it can take us out of the realm of the real and into the realm of possibility. I also decided that I didn’t want to expose participating writers to graphic imagery or details, which led me to come up with the idea of commissioning illustrations. I immediately thought of Claudia, whose whimsical, tender aesthetic I knew would be perfect for the project. 

The idea to make this project visual, then, was a way to spare writers the graphic nature of crime scene and morgue photography, but also to avoid sensationalizing the heinous violence that the women experienced. I didn’t want them to be remembered by disturbing images. I didn’t want their items–their clothes, their jewelry, their momentos–to be remembered just as forensic evidence of tragedy.  These items were worn or carried because they had once also been evidence of simple moments of meaning and beauty.

From the beginning, I knew this project had to be collaborative. I am a mixed-race, light-skinned Mexican-American cisgender woman— who is often assumed to be Middle Eastern. My grandparents on my dad’s side were migrants from Mexico, my mom grew up in a working class German-Irish home. Like most women, the experiences I have had with gender violence, harassment, and misogyny reflect and are shaped by all these things. It was therefore critical, I felt, to bring in diverse voices representing a wide range of ages, races, cultures, religions, and gender identities.

Now a couple years into the project, the importance of building a collective voice against misogyny and gender violence is becoming even more apparent. At the time of this writing, more and more stories of systemic sexual abuse inside the home and familicide are coming to light. Sixty percent of young women report that men they sleep with have strangulation fantasies. Incel and violent manosphere culture is increasingly becoming mainstream. Around the world, an average of 137 women and girls are killed by an intimate partner or family member everyday, the equivalent of one woman every ten seconds. In the United States, nearly 9 out of 10 women murdered by men are killed by someone they know. It is very likely, in fact, that many of the women celebrated in A Eulogy for Jane Doe were killed by their intimate partner, family member, or acquaintance. For these reasons, I will be expanding the project to include all victims of femicide in the United States, whose lives, identities, and stories — even when their names are known—can be obscured by the violence that ended them. The project will continue to include eulogies for unidentified women who perished along the U.S./Mexico border from starvation/dehydration as well as unhoused women, recognizing that the disregard and discarding of women exists on a spectrum.

A Eulogy for Jane Doe is, of course, intended to draw attention to the ubiquity of femicide and to all the ways we as a society exploit and brutalize women’s bodies and lives. But most of all it is a project of collective mourning and celebration. 

By honoring who the Jane Does might have been, the project seeks to give the women back a story, knowing it will never replace the one taken from them.

~Amalia Mora

Writer and Creator of A Eulogy for Jane Doe