Book review: globalization, shadow states and the production of disposable citizens

Abstract

In Montreal, Canada, on December 6, 1989, a 25-year old man entered a building on a university campus and shot and killed 14 women engineering students as he shouted “You’re all a bunch of feminists and I hate feminists.” In the ensuing years, as violence against women has increased globally, some North American analysts began to describe the murder of women as femicide. Yet, public opinion continues to view violent deaths of women as individual, anomalous acts committed by known perpetrators in spaces of domesticity and intimacy. In Latin America, as Terrorizing Women documents, most murders of women are performed in public and perpetrators act with impunity and remain anonymous. Further, the murders involve extensive cruelty prior to death, and humiliation after death as bodies are disposed of in garbage dumps and abandoned in public places. The scale of the murders, the patterns of torture,disposal and the targeting of a particular category of women— poor yet mobile women of color—has led Mexican anthropologist, Marcela Largarde y de los Rios, to develop an argument that the phenomenon constitutes feminicidio (feminicide), the murder of women because they are women. The term proposes that the murders do not simply constitute femicide—the murder of women contrasted to homicide, the murder of men. Rather, these murders are to be understood as acts of delegitimation and dehumanization, closer to genocide. Contributors to Terrorizing Women argue that feminicide confirms the “non-citizen” status of poor, migrant, non-white women in the Americas and, because the acts are committed in anonymity and with impunity, they signal the rule of law of a shadow state. Terrorizing Women is an interdisciplinary encyclopedia documenting the current wide-ranging and diverse approaches—legal, anthropological, sociological, political, activist—that are grappling with the implications of this systemic violence not only Crime Law Soc Change (2011) 56:103–110 DOI 10.1007/s10611-011-9312-7