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 Lopez, Ana Carcedo Cabanas, Jennifer Casey, Lucha Castro Rodriguez , Angelica Chazaro, Rebecca Coplan, Hector Dominguez-Ruvalcaba, Marta Fontenla, Alma Gomez Caballero, Christina Iturralde, Marcela Lagarde y de los Rios, Julia Estela Monarrez 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

An edited volume on the increased incidence of violence and homicide against women in Latin America.

About the Author

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 Rios, 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 Rios, 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 *



Book Information
ISBN 9780822346814
Author Rosa-Linda Fregoso
Format Paperback
Page Count 416
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 612g