Terrorizing Women

“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. . . . [It] will especially be pertinent for readers interested in the complexities of feminist movements to combat gender-based violence. [It] engages discussion, through its specific sites of interrogation, about social movement work on violence in a neoliberal context of politics, economics, and culture; how it is limited or co-opted; and where it is able to recuperate and sustain commitments to justice.”
- Soniya Munshi, Women's Studies Quarterly

“Terrorizing Women is a rich casebook for activists, lawyers, scholars and teachers of both undergraduate and graduate students in fields ranging from gender studies and anthropology to human rights law, political theory, and social justice and citizenship studies. Writing from across another border, in Canada, it is the hope of this reviewer that the insight, critique and creativity of this remarkable volume can provide fuel and inspiration for citizens and analysts to address the phenomenon of the hundreds of ‘missing Aboriginal women’ in this country.” - Sally Cole, Crime, Law and Social Change

“A well-written and thoughtfully organized edited volume. . . . Terrorizing Women is among the most illuminating collections on the study of contemporary violence as it intersects with gendered racism, the exploitation endemic to neoliberal capitalism, and the complicity of nation-states in rendering women’s bodies vulnerable to violence in the formal and informal markets of capital and misogyny.” - Molly Talcott, Contemporary Sociology

“This volume is a great resource for anyone interested in Women’s and Gender Studies, Latin American Studies, or Human Rights Studies.”
- Jenell Navarro, Women's Studies

“This volume synthesizes a growing interest in examining the way in which gender shapes violence by focusing on violence against women.” - Sarah England, Latin American Perspectives

“Anyone who is interested in gaining a deeper understanding of gendered violence and the phenomenon of feminicide in Latin America must read Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano’s Terrorizing Women. The book’s powerful contribution is to bring together the diverse voices of scholars, human rights lawyers, and activists, whose analyses help us better understand the structural and legal norms which give rise to the escalating violence against, and murders of, women.” - Karen Musalo, founding director, Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, Hastings College of the Law

“The concerted emergence of feminicidio finally traces the deep hollow of an absent international crime and a silent human rights violation. Now, fundamental inquiries must surface. Should the Genocide Convention be re-drafted to suppress, pursue, and punish feminicidio? Isn’t a peace that is only defined by the cessation of armed conflict one that can tolerate feminicidio? Isn’t securing transitional justice a perpetual ‘State’ for females? The authors’ piercingly astute observations disintegrate illusory historical, geographical, political, and sexual frontiers that confine us and assign us ‘partial human rights status.’ Yes, we rise to your siren.” - Patricia Sellers, former legal advisor for gender-related crimes, Office of the Prosecutor, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

“This one-of-a-kind book presents a collaborative hemispheric conversation among feminists responding to a crisis of overwhelming importance. It is a call to action from the field, a provocation for a new kind of knowledge and a new kind of activism. It is a book about history that will itself make history.” - George Lipsitz, author of American Studies in a Moment of Danger

“. . . Terrorizing Women is a vivid account of the complex interrelations between multiple factors that permit and encourage feminicide. By showing the enormity and deep roots of the problem of violence against women in Latin America, Terrorizing Women also allows readers to understand why feminicide has continued virtually unchecked for decades.” - Laura Jennings, Social Forces

“Terrorizing Women is a timely and essential read for people concerned about gender violence in intersection with multiple forms of injustice. Scholars, activists, legal experts and relatives of women murdered or disappeared expose feminicide as a complexly-layered social problem that demands urgent action. Insightful conceptual introductions by editors Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano, and by feminist activist/academic/politician Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos, are followed by useful analyses and concrete suggestions aimed at stopping feminicide and advancing justice.” - Barbara Sutton, International Feminist Journal of Politics

“[T]he range of Latin American and trans-border authors and disciplinary perspectives . . . combine to convey a sense of informed and urgent feminist debate. If one insight can be distilled from the case studies and scholarly analyses, it comes from Julia Huamanahui. As her brother-in-law rapes her he gloats: ‘Even if you scream, no one will hear you’. Years later, abandoning hope of legal recourse for her pregnant sister’s brutal murder, for which the husband is the only suspect, Julia concludes: ‘I think that for a person who is poor, there is no justice’. This book offers some possible alternatives to such lonely terror.” - Deborah Eade, Gender and Development

“Fregoso and Bejarano seek to introduce a human rights framework to our understanding of misogynistic murders. . . . The book makes the point that feminicide must be analysed within local and global networks of complicity. . . . The great value I see in this book is that it extends the conversation about femicide/feminicide beyond Mexico and into the rest of the Americas.” - Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Times Higher Education

“The writing here is . . . often urgent and disturbing. It always conveys the message that export-led economic development strategies and neoliberal restructuring plans, privatized police and justice systems, and the cultural and practical legacies from civil war and military dictatorship produce gendered perpetrators, victims, and cultures of impunity. Recommended.” - L. D. Brush, Choice