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Feminicidio: TWAIL in Action

Part of: Theorizing TWAIL Activism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Paulina García-Del Moral
Paulina García-Del Moral*
Affiliation:
Center for Research on Gender and Women, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Feminicidio is a Mexican adaptation of the radical feminist concept of femicide, usually defined as the misogynous murder of women by men because they are women. In this essay based on original fieldwork, I seek to contribute to Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholarship by providing a brief analysis of the engagement of Mexican grassroots feminist activists with international human rights law in their struggle against the systematic abduction, murder, and sexual abuse of hundreds of women and girls in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and the widespread impunity enveloping these crimes. As a result of this grassroots activism, these murders became known as feminicidios. Feminicidio expanded the existing concept of femicide by exposing the complicity of the state in the killing of women by sustaining the institutionalization of gender inequality. Indeed, activists consistently claimed that the state’s tolerance for impunity perpetuates the notion that women are disposable, and violence against them is not serious. Moreover, they linked this notion to the patriarchal regime of neoliberal capitalism that supports the maquiladora industry in Ciudad Juárez. Activists further drew on international human rights law. They invoked the due diligence obligation to conceptualize the responsibility of the Mexican state for failing to effectively prevent, investigate, and punish the murder of women—despite evidence of a systematic pattern of gendered violence that could only be understood by taking into consideration the intersecting structural gender and class inequalities that feminicidio revealed.

Type
Symposium on Theorizing TWAIL Activism
Information
AJIL Unbound , Volume 110 , 2016 , pp. 31 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of International Law 2016

References

1 See, e.g., Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing (Jill Radford & Diana E.H. Russell eds., 1992).

2 As part of my research, I conducted interviews with members of grassroots civil society organizations in Chihuahua City, the state capital, that were involved in the transnational mobilization against feminicidio.

3 See, e.g., Lagarde, Marcela, Preface: Feminist Keys for Understanding Feminicide: Theoretical, Political, and Legal Construction, in Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas xi (Fregoso, Rosa-Linda and Bejarano, Cynthia eds., 2010)Google Scholar; Julia Monárrez Fragoso, Trama de una Injusticia: Feminicidio Sexual Sistémico en Ciudad Juárez (2013).

4 Draft Articles on the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, Report of the International Law Commission on the work of its fifty-third session, 19 UN GAOR Suppl. No. 10, at 43, UN Doc. A/56/10 (2001), reprinted in [2001] 2 Y.B. Int’l L. Comm’n 26, UN Doc. A/CN.4/SER.A/2001/Add. 1.

6 Monárrez Fragoso, supra note 3

7 Anghie, Antony and Chimni, Bhupinder S., Third World Approaches to International Law and Individual Responsibility in Internal Conflicts, 2 Chinese J. OF Int’l L. 77, 79 (2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Sally E. Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice (2006); Levitt, Peggy & Merry, Sally E., Vernacularization on the Ground: Local Use of Global Women’s Rights in Peru, China, India and the United States, 4 Global Networks 441 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Boaventura de Sousa Santos & César A. Rodríguez Garavito, Law and Globalization From Below (2005).

9 González (“Cotton Field”) v. Mexico, Preliminary Objection, Merits, and Costs, Judgment, Inter-Am. Ct. H. R. (ser. C) No. 205 (Nov. 16, 2009).

10 Fagbongbe, Mosope, The Future of Women’s Rights from a TWAIL Perspective, 10 Int’l Community L. Rev. 401, 404 (2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rémi Bachand, Critical Approaches and the Third World. Towards a Global and Radical Critique of International Law, McGill Law School Working Paper (2010).

12 Id .

13 Monárrez Fragoso, supra note 3.

14 Wright, Melissa W., The Dialectics of Still Life: Murder, Women and Maquiladoras, 11 Pub. Culture 453, 469 (1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Id.

16 Elsewhere, I have also examined the gendered and racialized colonial dimension underlying this macho gender order. See Moral, Paulina García-Del, Representation as a Technology of Violence. On the Representation of the Murders and Disappearances of Aboriginal Women in Canada and Women in Ciudad Juarez. 36 Canadian J. Latin American & Caribbean Stud. 33 (2011)Google Scholar.

17 Fragoso, Julia Monárrez, The victims of Ciudad Juárez Feminicide: Sexually Fetishized Commodities, in Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas 59 (Fregoso, Rosa-Linda & Bejarano, Cynthia eds., 2010)Google Scholar.

18 Lagarde, supra note 3, at xxiii.

19 See Monárrez Fragoso, supra note 3.

20 Paulina García-Del Moral, Transforming Feminicidio: Framing, Institutionalization, and Social Change, Current Soc. (Dec. 23, 2015).

21 American Convention on Human Rights, Nov. 21, 1969, 1144 UNTS 143.

22 Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence against Women, Mar. 5, 1995, 33 ILM 1534.

23 See González (“Cotton Field”) v. Mexico, Preliminary Objection, Merits, and Costs, Judgment, Inter-Am. Ct. H. R. (ser. C) No. 205, paras. 137-145 (Nov. 16, 2009). It is important to note that the English version of the judgment inaccurately translates feminicidio as femicide.

24 Balakrishnan Rajagopal, International Law from Below: Development, Social Movement, and Third World Resistance (2003); Kennedy, David, The International Human Rights Movement: Part of the Problem?, 15 Harv. Hum. Rts. 101 Google Scholar; Kennedy, David, The International Human Rights Regime: Still Part of the Problem?, in Examining Critical Perspectives on Human Rights 19 (Dickinson, Rob et.al. eds., 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 See Sousa Santos & RodríGuez Garavito, supra note 8.

26 Levitt & Merry, supra note 8, at 441.

27 Id.

28 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, Dec. 18, 1979, 1249 UNTS 13.

29 See García-Del Moral, supra note 20, for an explanation of the transformation of feminicidio from an academic concept into a frame as well as its criminalization in Mexican law.

30 Levitt & Merry, supra note 8, at 459-460.

31 Id.

32 Merry, supra note 8, at 134, 215.

33 Paloma Angélica Escobar Ledezma v. Mexico, Case 12.551, Inter-Am. Comm’n H.R., Report No. 51/13 (July 12, 2013).