Term coined by the feminist writer and activist Diana E. H. Russell in 1976, introduced and developed in Latin America by the Mexican feminist anthropologist Marcela Lagarde, who used it to designate the extremely gruesome violence perpetrated against women in Ciudad Juárez, mainly immigrants working in textile factories on Mexico’s northern border. Lagarde pushed for the creation of a Special Commission on Feminicide in Congress to investigate the murder of women in Ciudad Juárez and she directed the Diagnostic Investigation on Feminicidal Violence in the Mexican Republic. The study concluded that feminicide is not exclusive to Ciudad Juárez and, as has been shown, to Mexico either. Rita Laura Segato has argued that the feminicides in Ciudad Juárez are crimes of a new mode of warfare (2014, 2016). She also argues in La escritura en el cuerpo de las mujeres asesinadas en Ciudad Juárez. Territorio, soberanía y crímenes de Segundo Estado [The writing on the body of murdered women in Ciudad Juárez. Territory, sovereignty, and crimes of the Second State] (2006) that the perpetrators of feminicides conceive of women’s bodies as “the privileged support for writing and broadcasting [a] violent and instructive message that counts on the intensification of media violence against them as an ‘ideological arm of the strategy of cruelty’” (Gago 2015). The term is now used in other geographical contexts to designate gender-related killings of women, whether they occur in public spaces or in the woman’s domestic or family sphere.
Verónica Gago explains: “Ciudad Juárez expands beyond Mexico because it functions as a sort of laboratory, anticipating how a certain labor and migrant energy of women expresses a political dynamism (a set of historical struggles) to escape from domestic confinement, of which transnational capital takes advantage. It is a desire for escape that the capitalist machine exploits, using the yearning for popular prosperity as fuel in order to translate it into dispossessive forms of labor, consumption, and debt—at its peak, becoming the femicidal machine (2019, 32).
Gago, Verónica (2015). «La pedagogía de la crueldad». Pàgina 12, 29 Maig.
Segato, Rita Laura (2014). «Las nuevas formas de la guerra y el cuerpo de las mujeres». Revista Sociedade e Estado, 29(2), 341-371.
Segato, Rita Laura (2016). La guerra contra las mujeres. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños.
Segato, Rita Laura (2021). «Crueldad: pedagogías y contra-pedagogías». Lobo suelto, 1-3.