Gender-Based Violence in a Neoliberal Context

At first glance, Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Américas and Everybody's Family Romance: Reading Incest in Neoliberal America appear quite distinct. The former is an edited collection that offers analytical frameworks, empirical research, and legal strategies to address the increasing rates of murders and disappearances of women throughout Latin America since the early 1990s. The latter conducts a critical interpretive reading of popular media, novels, state policy, legal proceedings, and other discursive materials to examine the emergence of incest in the changing cultural and political forms of U.S. nationalism in the late twentieth century. Neither text sits comfortably within a singular disciplinary framework, but Terrorizing Women is likely to be more compatible with social science texts, while Everybody's Family Romance may be situated in literary criticism/humanities. However, a closer look indicates that these two texts both engage questions about violence in the political, economic, and cultural contexts of neoliberal capitalism. Both these texts also interrogate the deployment of gender as a mode through which domains of political economy and race may be splintered from domains of family, sexuality, and violence.

Terrorizing Women facilitates a transdisciplinary and transnational dialogue through its contributions from feminist researchers; women's rights and human rights advocates; legal scholars; and witnesses who are writing from and about Latin America's growth in murders, disappearances, and other forms of violence against women. Grounded in an investment in scholarship and theoretical production from the Global South, one of this book's key objectives is to advance an analysis of feminicide, or "genocide against women [that] occurs when the historical conditions generate social practices that allow for violent attempts against the integrity, health, liberties, and lives of girls and women" (xvi). The editors' introduction argues for using the framework of feminicide as a political gesture, as its location within social, political, economic, and cultural inequalities transcends dominant conceptions of femicide (i.e., female homicide).

One of the main strengths of this volume is its engagement with root causes of feminicide and the resultant complexities in pursuing justice. In the introduction, the editors assert that the state is accountable for feminicide because of its "commission, toleration, [and] omission" (18) of violations of women's human rights. It is thus critical to integrate an understanding of the state's role in producing a culture of impunity for the murders and disappearances of women. Yet contributors such as Domínguez-Ruvalcaba and Ravelo Blancas as well as Weissman extend this analysis through their discussions of the reconfiguration of Mexican state power, market forces under neoliberal globalization, and the consequent transformation of culture and politics. These authors argue that the current climate of impunity is partly determined by the Mexican government's dependent relationships upon international financial institutions (IFIs) and organized crime networks. Market interests transcend the law, which means, for example, that tourist economies and the projection of external images to IFIs take priority over resourcing the state to sufficiently implement basic functions like law enforcement. Schmidt Camacho's essay focuses on the violence in Ciudad Juárez and the literal border space of Mexico and the United States to argue that feminicide underlies a binational (i.e., beyond the Mexican state) project of governance and economic growth that aims to create feminized labor populations and "disposable non-citizens" (276).

The transformative power that neoliberalism has over culture, as another force that transcends the state, is addressed in several pieces. For example, Segato is interested in the expressive noninstrumental qualities of violence in Ciudad Juárez and argues that the murders and disappearances are corporative crimes, or crimes of a "second state" (86), which exhibit a capacity to produce death and thus serve as an expression of domination; feminicide in Ciudad Juárez is then not a result of impunity but instead a producer of impunity. Weissman also discusses the implications of cultural frameworks, arguing, perhaps in contrast...