The War Against Women

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.

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 ItThe 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