Chapter 7: Femi[ni]cide and Space

Theorising the Socio-Spatial Scripts of Femi[ni]cide

Book Publication

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This chapter is dedicated to theorising the relationship between femi[ni]cide and space. As feminist geographers have emphasised, the politics of space are inextricably entwined with the politics of gendered death. Indeed, space is a key coordinate in the meaning-making processes that circulate around femi[ni]cide, as the implicit or explicit invocation of space lays important ideological scaffolding for how victims emerge representationally. Drawing upon a rich compendium of feminist geographical, Indigenous feminist, Black feminist, and postcolonial feminist thought, the chapter focuses on the ways in which bodies and spaces are woven together in the production of “socio-spatial scripts” of femi[ni]cide and suggests that resisting this violence and the impunity that so often follows it requires carefully attending to these scripts. It suggests that in order to identify and understand how the socio-spatial scripts of femi[ni]cide operate in a given empirical context, scholars of violence should turn their analytical attention to key sites of governmental power, such as news media, public policy and data, and rhetoric from political leaders and state or other powerful interlocutors. By encouraging the use of a socio-spatial lens, the chapter emphasises that the goal is not to naturalise the physical geography of gendered death, but rather, to render visible how femi[ni]cidal violence is spatially constituted—and often spatially rationalised. It ends by highlighting how diverse anti-femi[ni]cide movements around the world are challenging harmful socio-spatial scripts that emerge in the aftermath of this violence, underlining how resistance to femi[ni]cide is also spatialised.

External Authors

Lorena Feuntes

 

 


 

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