Femicide Gender And Violence

This book questions gendered readings of violence by analyzing how this paradigm has become normalized in Italy since the feminist term ‘femminicidio’, or ‘femicide’, entered the mainstream media during the 2013 general election. It also sheds light on discourses of contestation on the part of family activists, men’s rights campaigners and divorced fathers’ groups. Two counter-discourses emerge. The first is what the author terms an ‘ideology narrative’, for which discourses built around the conceptual category of ‘gender’ normalize simplistic representations of relationships between men and women. The second is a ‘female violence discourse’, which sheds light on under-represented aggressor-victim relations and modifies dominant representations of femininity and masculinity. The author argues that integrating these two discourses into public debates helps to reappropriate the complexity and biological dimensions of (violent) relationships between men and women, often overshadowed by gender/feminist perspectives. In this way, she concludes, we can address neglected social issues that contribute to violence beyond gender. This thought-provoking book will appeal to students and scholars of sociology, critical discourse studies and gender.

"... More than 300 women and men gathered in August 2008 at a conference entitled Missing Women: Decolonization, Third Wave Feminisms, and Indigenous People of Canada and Mexico. Here, personal stories and theoretical tools were brought together, as academics, activists, family members of missing and murdered women, police, media, policy-makers, justice workers, and members of faith communities offered their perspectives on the issue of racialized, sexualized violence."-- Back cover.

More than 600 women and girls have been murdered and more than 1,000 have disappeared in the Mexican state of Chihuahua since 1993. Violence against women has increased throughout Mexico and in other countries, including Argentina, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Peru. Law enforcement officials have often failed or refused to undertake investigations and prosecutions, creating a climate of impunity for perpetrators and denying truth and justice to survivors of violence and victims’ relatives. Terrorizing Women is an impassioned yet rigorously analytical response to the escalation in violence against women in Latin America during the past two decades. It is part of a feminist effort to categorize violence rooted in gendered power structures as a violation of human rights. The analytical framework of feminicide is crucial to that effort, as the editors explain in their introduction. They define feminicide as gender-based violence that implicates both the state (directly or indirectly) and individual perpetrators. It is structural violence rooted in social, political, economic, and cultural inequalities. Terrorizing Women brings together essays by feminist and human rights activists, attorneys, and scholars from Latin America and the United States, as well as testimonios by relatives of women who were disappeared or murdered. In addition to investigating egregious violations of women’s human rights, the contributors consider feminicide in relation to neoliberal economic policies, the violent legacies of military regimes, and the sexual fetishization of women’s bodies. They suggest strategies for confronting feminicide; propose legal, political, and social routes for redressing injustices; and track alternative remedies generated by the communities affected by gender-based violence. In a photo essay portraying the justice movement in Chihuahua, relatives of disappeared and murdered women bear witness to feminicide and demand accountability. Contributors: Pascha Bueno-Hansen, Adriana Carmona López, Ana Carcedo Cabañas, Jennifer Casey, Lucha Castro Rodríguez , Angélica Cházaro, Rebecca Coplan, Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, Marta Fontenla, Alma Gomez Caballero, Christina Iturralde, Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos, Julia Estela Monárrez Fragoso, Hilda Morales Trujillo, Mercedes Olivera, Patricia Ravelo Blancas, Katherine Ruhl, Montserrat Sagot, Rita Laura Segato, Alicia Schmidt Camacho, William Paul Simmons, Deborah M. Weissman, Melissa W. Wright

This book is about relating the concepts of rape and murder in both senses of the term; that is the way rape and murder are linked and related and also how stories of rape and murder are related or told.

More than 600 women and girls have been murdered and more than 1,000 have disappeared in the Mexican state of Chihuahua since 1993. Violence against women has increased throughout Mexico and in other countries, including Argentina, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Peru. Law enforcement officials have often failed or refused to undertake investigations and prosecutions, creating a climate of impunity for perpetrators and denying truth and justice to survivors of violence and victims’ relatives. Terrorizing Women is an impassioned yet rigorously analytical response to the escalation in violence against women in Latin America during the past two decades. It is part of a feminist effort to categorize violence rooted in gendered power structures as a violation of human rights. The analytical framework of feminicide is crucial to that effort, as the editors explain in their introduction. They define feminicide as gender-based violence that implicates both the state (directly or indirectly) and individual perpetrators. It is structural violence rooted in social, political, economic, and cultural inequalities. Terrorizing Women brings together essays by feminist and human rights activists, attorneys, and scholars from Latin America and the United States, as well as testimonios by relatives of women who were disappeared or murdered. In addition to investigating egregious violations of women’s human rights, the contributors consider feminicide in relation to neoliberal economic policies, the violent legacies of military regimes, and the sexual fetishization of women’s bodies. They suggest strategies for confronting feminicide; propose legal, political, and social routes for redressing injustices; and track alternative remedies generated by the communities affected by gender-based violence. In a photo essay portraying the justice movement in Chihuahua, relatives of disappeared and murdered women bear witness to feminicide and demand accountability. Contributors: Pascha Bueno-Hansen, Adriana Carmona López, Ana Carcedo Cabañas, Jennifer Casey, Lucha Castro Rodríguez , Angélica Cházaro, Rebecca Coplan, Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, Marta Fontenla, Alma Gomez Caballero, Christina Iturralde, Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos, Julia Estela Monárrez Fragoso, Hilda Morales Trujillo, Mercedes Olivera, Patricia Ravelo Blancas, Katherine Ruhl, Montserrat Sagot, Rita Laura Segato, Alicia Schmidt Camacho, William Paul Simmons, Deborah M. Weissman, Melissa W. Wright

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. The extent of violence against women is currently hidden. How should violence be measured? How should research and new ways of thinking about violence improve its measurement? Could improved measurement change policy? The book is a guide to how the measurement of violence can be best achieved. It shows how to make femicide, rape, domestic violence, and FGM visible in official statistics. It offers practical guidance on definitions, indicators and coordination mechanisms. It reflects on theoretical debates on ‘what is gender’, ‘what is violence’, and ‘the concept of coercive control’. and introduces the concept of ‘gender saturated context’. Analysing the socially constructed nature of statistics and the links between knowledge and power, it sets new standards and guidelines to influence the measurement of violence in the coming decades.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Femicide, the killing of women and girls because of their gender, was until recently included in the category ‘homicide’, obscuring the special features of this social and gendered phenomenon. However, the majority of murders of women are perpetrated by men whom they know from family ties and are the result of intimate partner violence or so-called 'honour' killings. This book is the first one on femicide in Europe and presents the findings of a four-year project discussing various aspects of femicide. Written by leading international scholars with an interdiscplinary perspective, it looks at the prevention programmes and comparative quantitative and qualitative data collection, as well as the impact of culture. It proposes the establishment of a European Observatory on Femicide as a new direction for the future, showing the benefits of cross-national collaboration, united to prevent the murder of women and girls.

This book discusses femicide in Italy, and the cultural conversations that have resulted from feminist discourse on lethal violence against women entering the mainstream, by analyzing journalistic inquiries and literary works produced after 2012. In a global and national context where activism’s goals are mainly discursive this study deepens our understanding of the role played by written narratives in the critique of a public interest matter such as gender-based violence. The first part of the book is dedicated to the analysis of three journalistic inquiries published in book format that focus on one or more cases of femicide that happened on the Italian peninsula. The second section draws on the concept of feminist rewriting to propose the analysis of a heterogeneous body of literary texts that explore some of the most controversial and notorious femicide cases covered by previous journalistic, historical, or mythical narratives, before demonstrating the close connection between theoretical and narrative discourse within the analyzed texts. This is a fascinating case study contributing to global understandings of gender-based violence, which will be important for researchers in gender studies, sociology, and media studies.