UCLA CSW Update Newsletter
Title From Misogyny to Murder: Everyday Sexism and Femicide in a Cross-Cultural Context
Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5tw6h8nk
Author Rodriguez, Gilda
Publication Date 2010-12-01
eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California CSW u p d atdecember e2010
15 From Misogyny to Murder
Everyday Sexism and Femicide in Cross-Cultural Context
by Gilda Rodríguez n the aftermath of the Montreal Massacre of 1989, in Iwhich Marc Lépine killed fourteen women—after ordering men out of the room and claiming he was “fighting feminism”—Jane Caputi and Diana Russell coined the term “femicide” to describe the killing of women qua women. The original definition emphasizes that femi- cide is only the most extreme form in a continuum that includes the many forms of violence against women, ranging from rape and sexual abuse to forced sterilization.1 However, femicide is not only related to other forms of explicit violence against women but also to everyday acts of misogyny that contribute to the creation of a culture of sexism and devalorization of women and their lives. These everyday sexist acts are often ignored or minimized, in such a way that their connection to large-scale forms of violence against women is obscured. The discon- nect between everyday misogyny and femicide in much of popular and media discourse is problematic on two counts. First, it contributes to
1. Jane Caputi and Diana E.H. Russell, “Femicide: Speaking the Unspeakable,” Femi- cide: The Politics of Woman Killing, ed. Jill Radford and Diana E.H. Russell (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992), 15. 16 csw update: december 2010 ...femicide is not only related to other forms of explicit violence against women but also to everyday acts of misogyny that contrib- ute to the creation of a culture of sexism and devalorization of wom- en and their lives. These everyday sexist acts are often ignored or minimized, in such a way that their connection to large-scale forms of violence against women is obscured.
the mischaracterization of gender-based mur- Since early 1993, over 500 Mexican foreign-owned assembly plants that are a der as simple killing, without a misogynistic women have been killed in the industrial major economic force in the area. Maquila- component, which makes it difficult to address border city of Juárez, in the state of Chi- doras predominantly seek female employ- the root causes of such violence. Secondly, huahua. A majority of the victims are poor ees because of their overwhelming need when “small” incidences of sexism occur, they or working-class girls and young women. for unskilled labor that is inexpensive, are more easily dismissed as inconsequential Their bodies are found in remote areas, easy to train and unlikely to file complaints and even harmless. My argument is that com- often bearing signs of sexual abuse and about workplace conditions. A stereotyped monplacesexist practices lay the conditions other physical violence. Although several view of “the malleable working woman”2 for femicide and for the political discourse that arrests have been made in connection to shaped the maquiladoras’ policy of hiring surrounds it. To this end, I examine two cases the murders, the crimes continue. The in- women, whose very femininity suppos- studies: the over five hundred femicides that ability of the authorities to solve the mur- edly made them docile, more apt for tasks have occurred in the border city of Juárez, ders, the result of both incompetence and requiring a high level of dexterity, and far Mexico, since 1993, and George Sodini’s corruption, has made Juárez an extremely less likely to be demanding that their male murder of three women in a gym in a suburb dangerous place to be a woman. More counterparts. of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in August of 2009. importantly, the lack of value accorded Very often, maquiladora workers and Though different in both scale and duration, to the lives of women in Juárez has made job applicants are subjected to pregnancy among other factors, these gendered crimes in it possible for the murders to go on with Mexico and the United States show how perva- impunity. 2. Leslie Salzinger, “From High Heels to Swathed Bod- sive the link is between everyday sexist prac- A great number of the femicide victims ies: Gendered Meanings under Production in Mexico’s tices and femicide across cultural contexts. were employed in Juárez’s maquiladoras, Export-Processing Industry,” Feminist Studies, 23.3 (Autumn 1997), 549–574. 17 csw update: december 2010 tests3 and lengthy questioning about mari- Melissa Wright links the disregard for Caputi and Russell argue that “[m]isog- tal status and personal plans, because em- the value of women in the maquiladora yny not only motivates violence against ployers favor young, single women who are environment to the devaluing of women’s women, but distorts the press coverage of less likely to miss work due to domestic lives implicit in the murders. She con- such crimes as well. […] The police, me- responsibilities.4 The maquiladora model is ceptualizes the high rates of turnover as dia and public response to crimes against built on a conception of its workers as dis- a corporate death of sorts, in which the women of color, poor women, lesbians, posable. The hard physical labor makes it women’s labor is more valued than the women prostitutes, and women drug users impossible for most women to work in the women themselves. As long as the plants is particularly abysmal—generally apa- industry for more than a few years, when produce goods cheaply and efficiently, the thy laced with pejorative stereotyping and their bodies can no longer keep up. The owners do not care about who is produc- victim-blaming.”7 The discourse around restrictions on pregnancy and marriage, ing them. As Wright explains, “turnover the Juárez femicides follows this pattern: and the lack of accommodations for wom- itself […] is not necessarily a waste but the dark-skinned, working-class female en with children, make it so the realities of the by-product of a process during which victims receive little attention in the Mexi- these women’s lives are often in conflict human beings turn into industrial waste.”6 can national media, and, when they do, with their employers’ expectations, and The maquiladora workers are disposable they are often accused of being “loose,” thus the turnover rate is high. However, the and always replaceable. The basic human as if their perceived morality in some way labor supply is plentiful,5 and, aware of this rights of a woman, like that of privacy, can makes their deaths acceptable. A prosecu- competition, maquiladora workers often be violated because if she resists such a vi- tor for the state of Chihuahua famously prefer not to speak up when overworked olation, there will be another worker eager suggested implementing a curfew to stop or abused, and go to great lengths to hide and ready to take her place. the murders, because it would keep “good pregnancies and find alternative childcare The disposability of the women, and people” off the street at night8—implying arrangements. more specifically their bodies, then, is that the lives of so-called loose women common to both the murders and maqui- were expendable. The current president, 3. A federal anti-pregnancy discrimination law was only passed in 2003, and its enforcement is lax, particularly in ladora work. Despite the efforts of local Felipe Calderón, has remained tight-lipped the maquiladora sector. Emily Miyamoto Faber, “Preg- and international nongovernmental orga- on the subject, while devoting consider- nancy discrimination in Latin America: the exclusion of nizations, the murders continue, and the able energy (and several trips to Juárez) ‘employment discrimination’ from the definition of ‘labor laws’ in the Central American Free Trade Agreement,” gendered basis for the violence is often to drug-related violence. In 2005, his Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, 16 (2007), 307. ignored. The already-high incidence of predecessor, Vicente Fox, accused the 4. Patricia Fernández-Kelly, “Maquiladoras: The View crime in Juárez—much of it related to the media of sensationalizing crimes that, he from the Inside,” The Women, Gender, and Development Reader, ed. Nalini Visvanathan et al (London: Zed Books, drug trade—has escalated in recent years, claimed, had been solved and were no 1997), 208; Melissa Wright, “The Dialectics of Still Life: making it difficult to distinguish, in media longer a problem. At the same time, the Murder, Women and Maquiladoras,” Millennial Capitalism and political narratives, the gender-based maquiladoras, which deny any connection and the Culture of Neoliberalism, eds Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001), 140. murders from ones motivated by other 7. Caputi and Russell, 15. 5. Althea J. Cravey, Women and Work in Mexico’s Maqui- causes. 8. Lourdes Portillo, Señorita Extraviada (New York, NY: ladoras (Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 72. 6. Melissa Wright, Disposable Women and Other Myths of Women Make Movies, 2002). Global Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2006), 83. 18 csw update: december 2010 “Sodini,” said a member of the Allegheny County Police Department, “just had a lot of hatred in him, and he was hellbent on doing this act.” The gunman chose the aerobics class, he said, simply because it had a lot of women in it.
between their practices and the femicides, opening fire in a female space in the gym following a script of conventional feminin- continue to be an important player in the where he was a member. In this case, the ity by exercising in that environment. The city’s economy.9 mainstream media, including the Associ- amount of press coverage, including the Meanwhile, in the summer of 2009, ated Press and the New York Times, and pictures of the murdered women, contrasts George Sodini opened fire on a women’s local authorities were quick to recognize starkly with the few, short mentions, rarely aerobics class in Pittsburgh, killing three the gendered nature of the murders. “So- including any pictures, of the Juárez kill- women and injuring nine more before dini,” said a member of the Allegheny ings in the local daily, El Norte de Juárez. committing suicide. The victims were all County Police Department, “just had a lot In many ways, the discourse surround- strangers to Sodini, who maintained a of hatred in him, and he was hellbent on ing the femicides in Pittsburgh succeeds blog that revealed his intent to commit the doing this act.”10 The gunman chose the at overcoming the challenges outlined by crime and included several misogynistic aerobics class, he said, simply because it Caputi and Russell and clearly identifies rants (the word “ho” features prominent- had a lot of women in it. the gendered basis of the violence without ly). Sodini, whose romantic advances had The narrative is also strikingly devoid incurring inminimization or victim-blaming. been rejected by women for years—he of the sort of victim-blaming we often en- It was feminist bloggers, not the police claimed that “30 million women” had counter in the case of the Juárez women. or media, who made the connection be- turned him down—and had not had sex Sodini’s victims—all white and middle- tween other sexist practices and femicide. in decades, decided to take revenge by class—were not doing anything they were As Amanda Marcotte put it, not “supposed” to do, and were in fact 9. “Fox says media ‘reheating’ Mexico women’s mur- Today, women will be raped or beaten or maybe ders,” Reuters, May 30, 2005.
Much like in the case of Marc Lépine of the Montreal Massacre, certain discourses understand Sodini as “crazy” or “dement- ed”—an anomaly, rather than the most ex- treme form of a kind of violence that hap- pens every day, thanks to a culture that allows and supports it.12 Anne Applebaum, for example—also writing online—said that it was a “ludicrous proposition” to believe that “we are all so inured to the victimiza- tion of the female half of the population that we don’t even notice it anymore.”13 It is precisely this sort of contention that I attempt to argue against in this pa- per. There is, in fact, in many contexts, a 11. Amanda Marcotte, “These Crimes Don’t Happen in a Vacuum,” Pandagon, August 5, 2009.
generalized culture of disregard, and even grown and gained much attention in re- Underlying this sort of claim are two hatred, for women that makes it difficult cent years, with best-selling books includ- problematic assumptions: the first, that for us to understand that femicide does not ing Neil Strauss’ The Game, and a reality frustration at the lack of attention from happen in vacuum, but is rather just one— show on VH1, The Pickup Artist, that ran women is, if not justifiable, at least an if extreme—manifestation in an environ- for two seasons (2007–2008); it is also the understandable reason for unleashing this ment that accepts and fosters, to varying inspiration for Will Smith’s movie Hitch. In sort of violence; the second has to do with degrees, behaviors that are degrading and the aftermath of the Sodini murders, some the presumption that women are highly detrimental to women, including many members of the pickup artist community manipulable—and in fact should be ma- forms of violence. In the case of the So- wrote about how if the gunman had fol- nipulated to fulfill men’s desires. Pickup dini femicides, bloggers have identified a lowed their rules of seduction, he would artistry might seem like a harmless way particularly insightful connection between not have had the sexual frustration that led for unlucky-in-love men like George So- his crime and the culture of the so-called to the shooting spree: dini to get a date, but it is also part of an “seduction community,” which attempts increasingly prominent subculture where to increase men’s sexual and romantic If Sodini had learned game he would have been women matter only insofar as they sat- conquests through techniques allegedly able to find another woman and gotten laid af- isfy a man’s desires, and where they are derived from social psychology. “Pickup ter his ex dumped him. He wouldn’t have spent interchangeable with one another. The the next 20 years steeped in bile and weighed artists” are men who have developed goal of the pick-up artist, as one of them, down by his Sisyphian [sic] blue balls, dream- skills with the end of successfully seduc- ing of vengeance. Game could have saved the David DeAngelo, puts it, is to talk to “any ing women—the goal is to seduce as many lives of the women Sodini killed.14 2009.
22 csw update: december 2010