What is Justice for a Victim of Femicide? Challenging the Concepts of Rights and Justice from a Context of Disposability of Female Bodies

Central America is one of the most violent regions in the world, outside of an open war zone, with countries like El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, presenting some of the highest homicide rates. As a regional tendency, female homicides have increased at a much higher rate than male homicides. Violence against women is an extreme manifestation of gender discrimination and a deadly tool to perpetuate women`s subordination. While femicide is a universal phenomenon, there are certain contexts, generated by histories of coloniality, exclusion, racism, sexist norms and the presence of organized crime that propel the conditions for an increased rate of femicides.

In those contexts, femicides are not social anomalies. They play a role in a climate of increasing authoritarianism and become a form of “pedagogy of cruelty” with a punitive and disciplining discourse. Because of this femicides usually take place under conditions of indifference and impunity. The dead body becomes a signifier of multiple systems of inequality that produce a context of “disposability” of women. In a context of disposability of female bodies, I question the rights paradigm and its supposed challenge to unequal relations of power. I also question the concept of justice as it is used in liberal democracies because of its instrumental logic and objectifying nature.

If we would like to envision a world without the misogynist killing of women, the rights paradigm and the pursuit of justice will fail, unless they guarantee women’s access to full lives, not only in terms of recognition or representation, but in terms of the social, economic and political conditions required for the female bodies to exist, beyond just survival.