Politicizing Femicide: Counter-Strategies Against Extreme Right-Wing Instrumentalization of Gender-Based Violence

This paper aims to explore the complexities of gender violence with a particular focus on how feminist responses to femicinide can serve as counter-strategies against extreme right-wing exploitation. In recent years, extreme right-wing groups have appropriated issues like sexual violence to advance their racist agendas. This has often led to a false dichotomy where racism and sexism are played off against each other, and sexual violence is either downplayed or overemphasized. This paper will address how a perspective that tackles both misogyny and patriarchal violence can be developed without resorting to racist instrumentalizations. It will highlight the critical yet often overlooked global commonalities of patriarchal violence, and examine how the extreme right has exploited these issues to dominate the discourse.

In contrast, in July 2020 in Austria a movement was founded that has set itself the task of politicizing patriarchal violence and its extreme intensifications: feminicides. It follows on from the feminist movement Ni Una Menos, which originated in Latin America. In the course of this politicization, important feminist debates were initiated – from the entanglements with other ideologies of inequality in capitalism to the question of which improvements would be possible under the auspices of current conditions of exploitation and to whom corresponding demands could be addressed. By answering to every single feminicide, regardless of the respective (origin) stories of the perpetrators, it is also possible to refer to the central commonalities of patriarchal violence and destructive constructions of masculinity across the globe, to counteract ethnicization and to expose the selective right-wing instrumentalizations as racist.