Tracing Responses to Femi(ni)cide in Postconflict Guatemala: A Transnational Feminist Analysis

In the first decade of the 2000s, feminists and human rights activists in Guatemala began to call attention to an increasing number of murders of women in the country. Mobilizing the discourse of femicidio / feminicidio that was circulating in many parts of Latin America at the time, they advocated for womens right to live free from violence and pressured the state to address the conditions that infringe on this right. This dissertation addresses state and civil society responses to femi(ni)cide, examining the assumptions embedded in these responses and their implications for questions of justice and accountability in Guatemalas postconflict and post-genocide context. It draws on interviews with 33 key informants (activists and advocates, representatives of NGOs and state institutions) as well as textual analysis of reports on and campaigns against femi(ni)cide. Grounded in an antiracist and transnational feminist framework, it offers a historicized and contextualized analysis of femi(ni)cide as embedded in social relations of power and structures of exclusion, privilege, and marginalization. The dissertation uncovers a tension between everyday and exceptional violence running through anti-femi(ni)cide activism that is largely sustained by the idea of a continuum of violence against women. Such a continuum links more common and normalized forms of gendered violence to headline-grabbing murders exhibiting signs of torture and overkill by explaining them as violence that affects all women as women. While sustaining this tension was central to activists success in pressuring legislators to adopt a law that criminalized several forms of gendered violence, it has also contributed to the erasure of the particular women targeted by more exceptional forms of violence: those marginalized by constructions of class, race/ethnicity, gender expression, sexuality, and proximity to sex work, gangs, and criminality— whether real or presumed. Contextualizing the Guatemalan states responses to femi(ni)cide within its historical treatment of sexual and gendered violence in law reveals the gendered, racialized, and classed constructs as well as the structural barriers that together mediate access to justice. Given that state responses to femi(ni)cide have largely been limited to the realm of criminal law, these findings warn against relying on the state to address gendered violence.