The Force of Witness: Contra Feminicide

Rosa-Linda Fregoso’s The Force of Witness: Contra Feminicide begins with a difficult question: what can witnessing do when institutions charged with recognizing violence are implicated in the impunity that lets it continue? The book’s answer is not to abandon evidence or law, but to widen the meaning of witness. A witness is not only an autonomous observer who can certify what happened; witnessing also names relations among those who remember, testify, represent, listen, and accept responsibility for what follows. That shift turns looking from a claim to innocence into a question of response.

The form makes this argument concrete. Fregoso brings together essays written over roughly a decade, framed by a prelude and postlude and arranged across six chapters with three interludes. The movement is not a single linear case study: it travels from chronicles of witness and the history of feminicide in Mexico to artists, communal memory, a people’s tribunal, and gender-asylum testimony. The sequence lets legal, political, and aesthetic practices remain distinct while showing how they meet. Fregoso calls for a “both/and” understanding: formal testimony can matter, yet no courtroom exhausts what a community knows or what justice requires.

That distinction is especially visible in the work of activist mothers and relatives searching for daughters who have been murdered or disappeared. When police and other authorities delay, dismiss claims, or fail to investigate, families are pushed into tasks that should not be theirs: gathering evidence, circulating names, preserving photographs, and making public demands. Their memory work is not simply private grief made visible for an audience. It contests the official archive’s power to decide which lives are worth recording and makes kinship a source of political knowledge. The campaign name Ni Una Más—“Not One More”—turns remembrance toward a future claim: these losses are neither inevitable nor acceptable.

Fregoso’s use of “feminicide” also moves the analysis beyond a story of individual cruelty. It asks how gendered killing becomes repeatable within arrangements of racialization, class, sexuality, labor, colonial history, policing, and state abandonment. At the Mexico–US border, the figure of the poor, racialized woman worker cannot be separated from the economic and political systems that expose some bodies to greater danger and then make their disappearance easier to disregard. This is not a claim that all Mexican women or all border communities share one experience. The book’s force depends on keeping the histories and locations specific—and on refusing explanations that turn “culture” into a timeless excuse for violence.

Art becomes a second arena in which a witness can either interrupt or reproduce that disregard. Fregoso’s discussion of Lourdes Portillo’s documentary Señorita Extraviada asks how images, testimony, landscape, and sound can connect viewers to the living and the dead without pretending that seeing is the same as knowing. Projects such as The Wall of Memories: Las Desaparecidas and ReDressing Injustice make public remembrance through portraits, names, clothing, and collective ritual. These forms can resist erasure, but visibility is not automatically ethical: images of murdered women can circulate as spectacle, while testimony can expose relatives to renewed danger. The question is not simply whether an artwork makes suffering visible; it is who controls its use, whose memory it serves, and what relation it asks the viewer to enter.

The book’s idea of accompaniment sharpens that ethical test. Pink crosses, vigils, protest chants, memorials, and hearings do not all do the same work, and none should be treated as a substitute for material protection or institutional accountability. Fregoso’s account of the Permanent People’s Tribunal shows how a public hearing can hold together factual testimony and the lived knowledge of mothers and advocates, even when state-centered legal systems have failed them. For visitors, scholars, and international allies, solidarity therefore cannot mean taking over the story. It asks for listening, reciprocity, and respect for the leadership of people already organizing under risk.

The final chapter, “Stolen Lives and Fugitivity,” carries this framework into migration and gender asylum. Fregoso’s work as an expert witness puts her inside a legal process in which survivors recount trauma and an expert must translate testimony into an assessment of danger. That translation can be painful and politically fraught: legal protection may require a woman to appear as vulnerable, potentially fixing her in the passive-victim role that feminist analysis seeks to unsettle. Yet Fregoso does not resolve the dilemma by rejecting legal advocacy. The category of vulnerability can be used strategically to secure a right to remain alive and to protect children. The same process can thus reproduce paternalism and open a route to survival; its meaning depends on who controls the account and whether the survivor’s agency remains legible.

“Fugitivity” names a related refusal: people escaping violence are not only objects moved across borders or cases awaiting a state’s decision. Their flight can be an act of agency against conditions designed to make life precarious or impossible. The book links that movement to longer histories of colonial dispossession, racial governance, and unequal borders, challenging humanitarian stories that celebrate rescue while leaving those histories intact. It does not romanticize forced migration; it asks what forms of protection, solidarity, and political responsibility make a future possible without turning survival into another spectacle.

The book’s own tension is that witnessing can become a demand placed on those already carrying the greatest burden: to testify again, to make pain intelligible, to educate distant audiences. A relational theory of witness is most useful when it changes the conduct of listeners and institutions, not when it creates a new obligation for survivors to be visible. Fregoso’s framework invites readers to ask how memory, art, law, and activism can support collective action while preserving the right to withhold, refuse, or leave. For a broader map of how feminicide is structured across the Americas, read it alongside Fregoso and Cynthia L. Bejarano’s edited Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas; the two books offer complementary routes, not interchangeable accounts.

Sources and further reading: Duke University Press’s book page and contents, its public introduction excerpt, Nathalia P. Hernández Ochoa’s E3W review, and Deborah Eade’s review in Gender & Development.