Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas

Edited by Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia L. Bejarano, this collection helped establish “feminicide” as more than a synonym for the murder of women. The term directs attention to a system in which misogynistic violence becomes predictable and repeatable because police, courts, governments, employers, and public narratives fail to prevent it or actively sustain impunity. Individual perpetrators remain responsible, but the analytical frame widens to include the institutions that decide whose disappearance matters.

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.

Some statistics and legal contexts have changed since 2010, so readers should pair the collection with current regional data. Its conceptual intervention remains indispensable. It teaches readers to resist spectacular accounts of isolated cruelty and to ask instead how violence is administered, normalized, and made profitable—and how collective feminist practices can challenge that entire arrangement.