Recent decades of neoliberal rule have seen authoritarian turns in many governments, and these decades have also been marked by increasing violence against women. The systematic killing of women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, has given way to a violent surge that is worldwide in its scope, concentrated in places where the state’s traditional, sovereign functions have broken down. Femicide is no longer just an intimate event: it has become anonymous and systematic, a crime of power. An intensified form of capitalism, the product of a colonial modernity that is still with us, now fuels new wars on women, which destroy society while targeting women’s bodies.
Understanding this new, violent turn within patriarchy—which Rita Segato considers the primal form of human domination—means moving patriarchy from the margins to the center of our social analysis. According to Segato, it is only by revitalizing community and repoliticizing domestic space that we can redirect history towards a different destiny. At stake is nothing less than the future of humanity.
Cuprins
Foreword – Jelke Boestens
Prologue to the Second Edition
Introduction
Theme One: The Centrality of the Question of Gender
Theme Two: Patriarchal Pedagogy, Cruelty, and War Today
Theme Three: What Hides the Role of Patriarchy as the Pillar that Sustains All Powers
Theme Four: Toward Politics in a Feminine Key
The Writing on the Bodies of Murdered Women in Ciudad Juárez: Territory, Sovereignty, and Crimes of the Second State
Science and Life
The Femicides in Ciudad Juárez: A Criminological Wager
Epilogue
Women’s Bodies and the New Forms of War
Introduction
The Informalization of Contemporary Military Norms
Changes in the Territorial Paradigm
Corresponding Changes in Political Culture, or The Factionalization of Politics
The Mafialización of Politics and the State Capture of Crime
Femigenocide: The Difficulty of Perceiving the Public Dimension of War Femicides
Patriarchy, from Margin to Center: Discipline, Territoriality, and Cruelty in Capital’s Apocalyptic Phase
The History of the Public Sphere is the History of Patriarchy
Discipline and the Pedagogy of Cruelty: The Role of High-Intensity, Colonial Modern Patriarchy in the Historical Project of Capital in its Apocalyptic Phase
History in Our Hands
Coloniality and Modern Patriarchy
Duality and Binarism: The “Egalitarian” Gender Relations of Colonial Modernity and Hierarchy in the Pre-Intrusion Social Order
Femigenocide as a Crime Under International Human Rights Law
The Struggle for Laws as a Discursive Conflict
Disputes over Whether or Not to Name
The Struggle to Elevate Femicide to the Legal Status of Genocide Against Women
Conditions for Writing Femicide into State Law and Femigenocide into Human Rights Law
Five Feminist Debates: Arguments for a Dissenting Reflection on Violence Against Women
The Victimization of Women in War
Unequal but Different
On the Role We Assign to the State
How Not to Ghettoize the Question of Gender
Power’s New Eloquence: A Conversation with Rita Segato
From Anti-Punitivist Feminism to Feminist Anti-Punitivism
For an Anti-Punitivist Feminism: Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right
Presentation before the National Senate, April 20, 2017, at the Hearing Called to Assess a Proposal to Impose Harsher Punishments in Response to the Killing of Micaela García on April 1, 2017
For a Feminist Anti-Punitivism: “Femicide and the Limits of Legal Education”
By Way of Conclusion: A Blueprint for Reading Gender Violence in Our Times
Conceptual Framework: Gender Asymmetry and What Sustains It The Two Axes of Aggression and the Masculine Mandate
Femicide and Femigenocide
Two Legal Categories Awaiting Recognition in International Human Rights Law
The Importance of a Transnational, Comparative Approach
The Para-State, New Forms of War, and Femigenocide
On the Need to De-Libidinize Sexual Aggression and to See Acts of Gender Aggression as Fully Public Crimes
Expressive Violence: The Specificity of the Message, the Capacity for Cruelty, and Territorial Domination
Expressive Violence: The Spectacle of Impunity
A Watershed in the History of War
The Masculine Mandate and the Reproduction of Military Labor
Bibliography
Notes
Index
Despre autor
Rita Segato is Emerit Professor at the University of Brasília and is the author of numerous books, including A Critique of Coloniality: Eight Essays. She was awarded the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021 and the Doctorate Honoris Causa from the University of Salamanca.