Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas

Published by Duke University Press 2010

Terrorizing Women

Feminicide in the Americas

Edited by: Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia L. Bejarano
With contributions by: Marcela Lagarde y de los Rios and Mercedes Olivera

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822392644

Overview
Contents

About this book

Feminist and human rights activists, attorneys, and scholars from Latin America and the U.S. respond to the escalation in violence against women in Latin America during the past two decades.

Author / Editor information

Rosa-Linda Fregoso is Professor of Latin American and Latino studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of meXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands and Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture.

Cynthia L. Bejarano is Regent Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at New Mexico State University. She is the author of Que Onda? Urban Youth Culture and Border Identity.

Reviews

“Terrorizing Women is a timely and essential read for people concerned about gender violence in intersection with multiple forms of injustice. Scholars, activists, legal experts and relatives of women murdered or disappeared expose feminicide as a complexly-layered social problem that demands urgent action. Insightful conceptual introductions by editors Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano, and by feminist activist/academic/politician Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos, are followed by useful analyses and concrete suggestions aimed at stopping feminicide and advancing justice.” - Barbara Sutton, International Feminist Journal of Politics

“Fregoso and Bejarano seek to introduce a human rights framework to our understanding of misogynistic murders. . . . The book makes the point that feminicide must be analysed within local and global networks of complicity. . . . The great value I see in this book is that it extends the conversation about femicide/feminicide beyond Mexico and into the rest of the Americas.” - Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Times Higher Education Supplement

“[T]he range of Latin American and trans-border authors and disciplinary
perspectives . . . combine to convey a sense of informed and urgent feminist debate. If one insight can be distilled from the case studies and scholarly analyses, it comes from Julia Huamanahui. As her brother-in-law rapes her he gloats: ‘Even if you scream, no one will hear you’. Years later, abandoning hope of legal recourse for her pregnant sister’s brutal murder, for which the husband is the only suspect, Julia concludes: ‘I think that for a person who is poor, there is no justice’. This book offers some possible alternatives to such lonely terror.” - Deborah Eade, Gender and Development

“The writing here is . . . often urgent and disturbing. It always conveys the message that export-led economic development strategies and neoliberal restructuring plans, privatized police and justice systems, and the cultural and practical legacies from civil war and military dictatorship produce gendered perpetrators, victims, and cultures of impunity. Recommended.” - L. D. Brush, Choice

“. . . Terrorizing Women is a vivid account of the complex interrelations between multiple factors that permit and encourage feminicide. By showing the enormity and deep roots of the problem of violence against women in Latin America, Terrorizing Women also allows readers to understand why feminicide has continued virtually unchecked for decades.” - Laura Jennings, Social Forces

“Anyone who is interested in gaining a deeper understanding of gendered violence and the phenomenon of feminicide in Latin America must read Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano’s Terrorizing Women. The book’s powerful contribution is to bring together the diverse voices of scholars, human rights lawyers, and activists, whose analyses help us better understand the structural and legal norms which give rise to the escalating violence against, and murders of, women.”—Karen Musalo, founding director, Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, Hastings College of the Law

“The concerted emergence of feminicidio finally traces the deep hollow of an absent international crime and a silent human rights violation. Now, fundamental inquiries must surface. Should the Genocide Convention be re-drafted to suppress, pursue, and punish feminicidio? Isn’t a peace that is only defined by the cessation of armed conflict one that can tolerate feminicidio? Isn’t securing transitional justice a perpetual ‘State’ for females? The authors’ piercingly astute observations disintegrate illusory historical, geographical, political, and sexual frontiers that confine us and assign us ‘partial human rights status.’ Yes, we rise to your siren.”—Patricia Sellers, former legal advisor for gender-related crimes, Office of the Prosecutor, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

“This one-of-a-kind book presents a collaborative hemispheric conversation among feminists responding to a crisis of overwhelming importance. It is a call to action from the field, a provocation for a new kind of knowledge and a new kind of activism. It is a book about history that will itself make history.”—George Lipsitz, author of American Studies in a Moment of Danger

“A well-written and thoughtfully organized edited volume. . . . Terrorizing Women is among the most illuminating collections on the study of contemporary violence as it intersects with gendered racism, the exploitation endemic to neoliberal capitalism, and the complicity of nation-states in rendering women’s bodies vulnerable to violence in the formal and informal markets of capital and misogyny.”

-- Molly Talcott Contemporary Sociology

“. . . Terrorizing Women is a vivid account of the complex interrelations between multiple factors that permit and encourage feminicide. By showing the enormity and deep roots of the problem of violence against women in Latin America, Terrorizing Women also allows readers to understand why feminicide has continued virtually unchecked for decades.”

-- Laura Jennings Social Forces

“Terrorizing Women is a timely and essential read for people concerned about gender violence in intersection with multiple forms of injustice. Scholars, activists, legal experts and relatives of women murdered or disappeared expose feminicide as a complexly-layered social problem that demands urgent action. Insightful conceptual introductions by editors Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano, and by feminist activist/academic/politician Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos, are followed by useful analyses and concrete suggestions aimed at stopping feminicide and advancing justice.”

-- Barbara Sutton International Feminist Journal of Politics

“[T]he range of Latin American and trans-border authors and disciplinary perspectives . . . combine to convey a sense of informed and urgent feminist debate. If one insight can be distilled from the case studies and scholarly analyses, it comes from Julia Huamanahui. As her brother-in-law rapes her he gloats: ‘Even if you scream, no one will hear you’. Years later, abandoning hope of legal recourse for her pregnant sister’s brutal murder, for which the husband is the only suspect, Julia concludes: ‘I think that for a person who is poor, there is no justice’. This book offers some possible alternatives to such lonely terror.”

-- Deborah Eade Gender and Development

“Fregoso and Bejarano seek to introduce a human rights framework to our understanding of misogynistic murders. . . . The book makes the point that feminicide must be analysed within local and global networks of complicity. . . . The great value I see in this book is that it extends the conversation about femicide/feminicide beyond Mexico and into the rest of the Americas.”

-- Alicia Gaspar de Alba Times Higher Education

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Preface: Feminist Keys for Understanding Feminicide Theoretical, Political, and Legal Construction Marcela Lagarde Y De Los Ríos Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Acknowledgments Cynthia Bejarano Publicly Available Download PDF	xxvii
Introduction: A Cartography of Feminicide in the Américas Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART I: LOCALIZING FEMINICIDE
Testimonio Eva Arce Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	45
Violencia Feminicida Violence against Women and Mexico’s Structural Crisis Mercedes Olivera Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	49
The Victims of Ciudad Juárez Feminicide Sexually Fetishized Commodities Julia Estela Monárrez Fragoso Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	59
Territory, Sovereignty, and Crimes of the Second State The Writing on the Body of Murdered Women Rita Laura Segato Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	70
Getting Away with Murder Guatemala’s Failure to Protect Women and Rodi Alvarado’s Quest for Safety Angélica Cházaro, Jennifer Casey and Katherine Ruhl Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	93
Femicides in Mar del Plata Marta Fontenla Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	116
Femicide and Sexual Violence in Guatemala Hilda Morales Trujillo Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	127
When Violence against Women Kills Femicide in Costa Rica, 1990–99 Montserrat Sagot and Ana Carcedo Cabañas Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	138
Feminicide in Latin America and the Movement for Women’s Human Rights Adriana Carmona López, Alma Gómez Caballero and Lucha Castro Rodríguez Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	157
PART II: TRANSNATIONALIZING JUSTICE
Testimonio Julia Huamañahui Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	179
Obedience without Compliance The Role of the Government, Organized Crime, and ngos in the System of Impunity That Murders the Women of Ciudad Juárez Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba and Patricia Ravelo Blancas Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	182
Innovative Transnational Remedies for the Women of Ciudad Juárez William Paul Simmons and Rebecca Coplan Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	197
Global Economics and Their Progenies Theorizing Femicide in Context Deborah M. Weissman Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	225
Searching for Accountability on the Border Justice for the Women of Ciudad Juárez Christina Iturralde Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	243
Photo Essay Images from the Justice Movement in Chihuahua, Mexico Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	263
PART III: NEW CITIZENSHIP PRACTICES
Testimonio Rosa Franco Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	273
Ciudadana X Gender Violence and the Denationalization of Women’s Rights in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico Alicia Schmidt Camacho Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	275
Feminicidio Making the Most of an ‘‘Empowered Term’’ Pascha Bueno-Hansen Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	290
Paradoxes, Protests, and the Mujeres de Negro of Northern Mexico Melissa W. Wright Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	312
Testimonio Norma Ledezma Ortega Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	331
References Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	335
Contributors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	367
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	371

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 416
Illustrations
- Other: 13 photos, 2 line drawings, 12 tables

eBook

Published: June 18, 2010
ISBN: 9780822392644