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Violent and Violated Women: Justice and Gender in Rural Guatemala, 1936-1956
- Journal of Women's History
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 11, Number 3, Autumn 1999
- pp. 55-77
- 10.1353/jowh.2003.0113
- Article
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This article explores how sexual subordination legitimized class and racial hatreds in the Indian region of San Marcos, Guatemala, between 1936 and 1956. Based on court records, the author first draws a portrait of sexual violence, then examines infanticide and abortion, two crimes which were defined as female. "Permissible hatred" and unpunished rape softened the degradations of being born poor and male, in an admittedly perverse logic, by permitting these men to humiliate working-class and Indian women with an expectation of impunity. Similarly, in the realm of "illicit" sex outside of marriage, both men and women could freely practice acts of permissible hatred against women accused of abortion or infanticide.