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Chapter 5 explores how the growth of trade has facilitated the globalization of export-oriented, labor-intensive industries. The destabilization of social and economic life by macroeconomic policies is associated with growing inequalities and increasing levels of violence against women in several regions. The creation of “free trade” exacerbates gendered inequalities and creates unregulated environments in which violence against women thrives. The first part of this chapter explores violence against women in countries that have undergone political and economic transitions, drawing on the case of Russia. The second part explores cases of both manufacturing and extractive export industries and their impact on violence against women, particularly the increasing incidence of femicide. The third part considers the role of international financial institutions that have extended development loans for export industries, exacerbating sexual and gender-based violence in places such as Papua New Guinea and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The chapter concludes by reflecting on initiatives that could forge nonviolent economies that improve gender-equal livelihoods and opportunities as a way to diminish the violence against women.

Memories of the Mirabal sisters’ murder in 1960 and a significant amount of United Nations resources (since the 1980s) have served to bolster a longstanding Dominican feminist movement, yet an epidemic of femicides in the country continues. Highlighting surrealist notions of ambiguity, the femme-enfant, morbidity, and rage, this concluding chapter asserts that for Dominican women and girls their ambiguities of identity play into structures of power that sustain widespread gender-based violence. This chapter argues that the border between girlhood and womanhood further contributes to their precarity as lives devalued under neoliberalism. The chapter examines the narrative of Minerva Mirabal in a contemporary film, controversially portrayed by queer Dominican American actress Michelle Rodriguez, alongside two recent deaths of pregnant teenage girls also vulnerable to patriarchal violence.

This chapter explores the cost of establishing familiarity as the criterion for mobilizing political action in relation to discussions within the human rights literature regarding the political advantages and disadvantages of forming social justice movements around the politics of testimonial witnessing. It considers the interconnection between witnessing and the politics of the familiar by focusing on the femicide movement in northern Mexico that, in the mid-1990s, galvanized political action against the murders and kidnappings of several hundred women and girls within a climate of state-sanctioned impunity. The chapter examines how the need to produce familiarity as the bond binding testifying witnesses to their witnessing public is currently limiting the femicide activists' ability to generate public protest over the escalation of violence against women and the curtailment of citizens' rights in relation to the government's drug war.

By engaging interventionist art by women of color at two different scales—ephemeral body/earth art and monumental public art—this chapter supplements post-humanist theories of “deep time”—in particular, the temporality of the Anthropocene—with a concept of “dark time.” The intensive, alchemical, and obscure temporality of “dark time” is crucial to understanding black and brown feminist performance interventions against the violence of expropriative capitalism in the Americas. The chapter reads the art work of Kara Walker and Regina José Galindo through the poetry of Harryette Mullen and philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.

This chapter concerns two social issues and their related contemporary moral panics in Italy: child abuse and femicide. Beginning from a national press analysis, the emergence of these panics, the disproportionality of the reaction and the role of the State in reinforcing the social concerns, are described and discussed.

How many women are victimized by lethal and nonlethal physical and sexual separation or divorce assault? What are the key risk factors associated with these harms? This chapter seeks to answer these questions, drawing from feminist and other sociological perspectives on violence against women.

This chapter examines femicide in Guatemala. By mid-2012, Guatemala had one of the highest femicide rates in the world, which is part of an escalating crisis that has gripped the nation since 2000. Femicide refers specifically to the killing of women by men for no other reason than the victim is a female. It usually involves sexual violence, mutilation, “overkill,” and is motivated by hatred and misogyny. Murders stemming from domestic killings fall into this category, as do a significant number of the non-domestic killings of women now taking place throughout Central America. Irma Chacon, coordinator of the Sobrevivientes, an acclaimed Guatemala City-based women's shelter, comments, “The dismemberment and torture we are seeing represents a desire to annihilate women, to erase their identities, destroy their femininity and to engender fear so great that women and girls are afraid to leave their homes.”

This chapter presents the asylum cases made by women from Central America who claimed intimate and sexual violence as persecution from the late 1980s to the present. While these women struggled early on for recognition, a number of the claimants have seen recent success. The chapter demonstrates how shifting political and economic dynamics between the United States and Central American countries, and transnational publicity in the form of “women's rights as human rights” activism, provide the rhetorical pressure needed for the state to recognize intimate gender violence as sufficiently political and public to warrant these women's incorporation. The asylum grants also enable the United States to mask a history of violent involvement in Central American affairs to position itself as a pastoral state that protects and defends women from sexual violence.

Chapter 4 disentangles the distinct ideologies often conflated under the expansive and notoriously vague rubric of Latina/o “transnationalism.” It first interrogates the limits of Radical Regionalism Studies by explicating the specter of nationalism in Emma Pérez’s ostensibly contestatory Tejana lesbian feminist regionalist historical fiction. The chapter further deconstructs the Latina/o Studies fixation on hyperlocalities and celebratory transnationalisms by interrogating the various aestheticizations of violence in Latina/o literatures about Central American civil wars, femicide in the US-Mexico border, and revolutionary insurgencies throughout North, Central, and South America, in addition to the Caribbean. It closes by underscoring Pan-Latina/o political diversity through the recovery of testimonial prose and poetry from Latina/o internationalist partisans and combatants vis-à-vis the antitestimonial memoirs, novels, and poetry by and about right-wing Latina/o soldiers and CIA officers.

Many mass shootings have in common a link to violence against women, whether because the shooters targeted women and girls or had histories of perpetrating intimate violence. Drawing on research from across the United States, the chapter argues that preventing mass shootings and other forms of gun violence requires also addressing violence against women. Evidence is presented on the links between gun violence and violence against women, including the use of guns to coerce and control victims as well as in intimate partner homicides. Further, research on the impact of gun policies on intimate violence, including the potential to prevent intimate partner homicides, is considered. The author proposes that adolescent dating violence prevention programs offer an important avenue to curb violence against women and, ultimately, gun violence.

Violence against women is common around the world and one of many drivers of migration. Regardless of the reason people migrate to new countries, girls and women are at risk of exploitation and violence during migration. Upon reaching the United States, women seeking asylum are confronted by a changing legal landscape in which beliefs about intimate violence can affect policies and ultimately women’s safety and futures. For instance, the chapter considers the ways that stereotypes about how victims should behave can affect credible fear interviews in the asylum process. Immigrant women living in the United States face risks from intimate violence and barriers to services. For example, language and social barriers may prevent women from learning about and accessing social, legal, and medical services that can be critical to surviving intimate violence. Finally, the chapter explores the ways that anti-immigrant sentiment can make women and our communities less safe from intimate violence.

Chapter 6 concerns denial of women’s right to life . The new frame of “femicide” has dramatically increased attention to gender-based killing in the public and private sphere, and encompasses a spectrum of threats and assaults that culminate in murder. The chapter follows the threats to women’s security through the life cycle, beginning with cases of “gendercide” (sex-selective abortion and infanticide) in India, then moving to honor killings in Turkey and Pakistan. We examine public femicide in Mexico and Central America—with comparison to the disappearance of indigenous women in Canada, as “second-class citizens” in a developed democracy. The chapter continues mapping the panorama of private sphere domestic violence in the semi-liberal gender regimes of China, Russia, Brazil, and the Philippines, along with a range of responses in law, public policy, advocacy, and protest.

This chapter explores the oddity and complexity of honor killing. Sample incidents are discussed to reveal the general features of honor killing as a traditional practice significantly different from other forms of femicide. Adopting the Human Rights Watch definition of honor killing as a neutral and provisional guide, the chapter argues that honor killing should be distinguished from crimes of passion, domestic violence, and crimes of violence. Honor killings uniquely involve perceived obligations to execute a dishonored female where male blood relatives serve as killers and killing is a means of restoring family honor. Although most common in Muslim-majority countries, this practice occurs globally and apparently at an increasing rate. There is continuing public support for honor killing in some countries where it has been traditional despite increased official efforts to criminalize the practice. There is no special connection between Islam and honor killing. No religion endorses honor killing.