Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas

Edited by Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia L. Bejarano, Terrorizing Women uses feminicide as a framework for understanding gendered violence in the Americas. The editors describe it as structural violence involving not only individual perpetrators but also the state, directly or indirectly; it is therefore not simply another word for the killing of a woman. The concept widens the questions asked of investigation, law, public memory, and remedy: whose disappearance is pursued, whose death can be ignored, and who gets to define evidence and justice? Individual responsibility remains, but is placed within the institutional relations that allow violence and impunity to persist.

The publisher organizes the volume into three connected parts: “Localizing Feminicide,” “Transnationalizing Justice,” and “New Citizenship Practices.” Its contents include Julia Estela Monárrez Fragoso on the sexual fetishization of Ciudad Juárez victims, Rita Laura Segato on territory and sovereignty, cases concerning Guatemala and Costa Rica, and chapters on transnational remedies, border accountability, a photo essay on Chihuahua’s justice movement, and the Mujeres de Negro protests. Together, these parts move from locating and naming violence to cross-border remedies and the civic practices created by relatives and activists.

The essays move from Ciudad Juárez across Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Argentina, and Peru. Contributors connect murders and disappearances to export economies, militarization, the afterlives of dictatorship and civil war, racialized labor, migration, and the sexual commodification of women’s bodies. This geography matters: violence is not explained by an abstract regional culture of machismo, but by historically specific arrangements of capital, territory, policing, and citizenship.

Testimonios from relatives and activists interrupt academic distance. Families search, document, march, build archives, and demand accountability when official institutions refuse to act. Their knowledge is not included merely to humanize a theory developed elsewhere; it changes the theory by showing how categories, evidence, and remedies emerge from movements. The photo essay on Chihuahua’s justice movement similarly treats public memory as political infrastructure.

The volume is also valuable for the questions it raises about law. Naming feminicide can make structural violence legible and create new routes to accountability, yet criminal categories alone cannot repair institutions already organized by racism, poverty, and impunity. A feminist response must therefore combine legal struggle with labor rights, migration justice, community safety, and material support for survivors and families.

Published in 2010, the collection is a historically situated intervention, not a current statistical account of violence across the Americas. Its continuing value lies in resisting spectacular narratives of isolated cruelty and asking instead how violence is administered, normalized, and made profitable—and how collective feminist practices can challenge those arrangements. The framework and chapter map summarized here follow the publisher description and contents.