Femicide: A Need for Orientation

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ABSTRACTFemicide can be understood as a political term rather than a legal or medico‐legal one—its contemporary use dates back to the late 1970s, when academics began to explore and define terminologies that exposed the gendered nature of violence, and that when a woman was murdered her gender was not incidental to that fact. Over the past 50 years, femicide (and, in some regions of the world, feminicide) has developed specific political, public health, criminological, and social meanings. In each of these contexts, however, the term/s remain contested, particularly when theoretical or scholarly definitions are applied equivocally between regions with relatively low prevalence of female homicides, and those with high endemic levels of fatal violence, such as in the global south. This article provides an introduction to and orientation of overarching themes, clusters and locations of study within contemporary and legacy academic literature and scholarship on femicide, including a discussion of feminicide, through a review of scholarly and institutional works, invoking frameworks of time, place, typology, discipline, and modes of injury and death.