A paving stone for sorority: Retracing the history of femicide to escape from it

A paving stone for sorority –

Retracing the history of femicide to overcome it

Christelle Taraud, historian, discusses the monumental book “Feminicides: a world history” which she led the development of.

BotTalk

• The book explores various historical and cultural aspects of global femicide.
• Christelle Taraud introduces the concept of the feminicidal continuum to shed light on this violence.
• The hunt for “witches” was a tool of male pacification in Europe.
• Historical patriarchal systems reinforce male dominance and female submission.

This article from November 24, 2022 was imported from Femina.ch and republished on our site on January 7, 2025.

In your book, “Feminicides. A world history”, you track the various forms of femicide. Is the term itself too narrow?

When we talk about the murder of a woman because she is a woman in an intimate and domestic context, it is more of a femicide. This concept was developed at a particular moment in history, in 1976, when a number of feminists and researchers organized in Brussels the first international tribunal against crimes against women. Femicide is something else. It is a concept that comes from Latin America, and more particularly from Ciudad Juárez in Mexico. This city embodies femicide which is a collective crime, a mass crime, a state crime, a crime with genocidal tendencies. It is not just about eradicating physical bodies but what constitutes the feminine as an identity, as a world and even as a people. The attack is different. The paradox is that in Europe, we have started to use the word feminicide to designate femicide. Neither term is, by definition, reductive, but I include them in the feminicidal continuum.

What do you mean by “feminicidal continuum”?

It is about extreme visible and brutal violence against women, such as murder, but it is also a whole spectrum of violence which ranges from the most physical to the most symbolic and which are interconnected. Our societies produce murderers, but to arrive very concretely at murder, we must have incorporated and accepted a whole series of violence and they are because there is a trivialization and tolerance of violence against women against a backdrop of impunity which is unprecedented in the history of discrimination. Women suffer various forms of violence, most often in silence, sometimes even while excusing their attackers in an incredible way. There is a specificity here which required the development of a new tool for understanding and analysis: hence the idea of ​​the feminicidal continuum which makes it possible to shed light on the entirety of this extremely polymorphous spectrum.

Throughout history and since the Neolithic, women have always been the extension of their husband, their family, their community. Is this the root of the problem?

Women have suffered gender-based violence almost forever. But indeed since the Neolithic at least, the regimes of force which pre-existed have become encysted and they have produced hierarchical systems which pit women and men more and more strictly and massively. These regimes of force, which have become low-intensity patriarchal regimes by monopolizing all powers, lead men to think of themselves and act as the first sex, the strong sex, the dominant sex and by mirror effect women to be the second sex, the weaker sex, the submissive sex. It’s very old in the history of humanity and that’s probably why it’s so difficult to get out of it because we have incorporated millennia of systems of crushing women.

Is the “witch” hunt that you describe as “mass crimes against women” an important step in explaining the domestication of women?

Absolutely. These “witch” hunts are a regime of terror that is established in Europe with the aim of sorting the female population into two categories: on the one hand, women who are not adaptable to the redefinition of radical hegemonic masculinity. and aggressive which is put in place between the end of the 14th century and the beginning of the 16th century in Europe and which must be eradicated, on the other those which are supposed to be “readaptable” to whom it is a question of sending a very strong message. This policy of terror, which must be taken into account, causes terrible fear in the female population. There are, of course, the executions themselves by hanging or at the stake – between 200,000 and 500,000 according to a consensus of figures which are probably underestimated – but there is also the permanent surveillance of women subjected to generalized suspicion of the made of their ontological association with evil. This surveillance is all the more useful because it allows women to be divided while putting in place training based on policies of coercion/punishment in which they are required to collaborate in order to survive.

Is it at this moment in history that the notion of “owner’s crime” appears to talk about femicide?

These “witch” hunts are very important, because they are a tool of pacification in Europe for men who have important things to do, like launching industrial capitalism or setting out to conquer the world: they cannot burdening their homes with “good women’s business”, they must understand where their true place is, that they are reduced to the domestic, productive and reproductive space. It is this world which emerges from the great “witch” hunts and which will be completed by all the major legal mechanisms for the submission of women, in particular the Napoleonic civil code for France, and which will be exported in a large part of Europe. An extremely powerful network which recognizes the fact that the woman must submit to her husband and that women are the property of men, this is what the Napoleonic civil code says. This is why we speak of property crime to designate femicide (individual crime) and feminicide (collective and state crime).

This continuity of violence sends shivers down your spine. Do you believe in a possible end to this crushing of the feminine?

I believe in it because that’s the meaning of the story. We cannot do anything other than radically change the relationship we have with each other, with living things, with the planet. I also believe in it a lot, because since the book came out, I have noticed that many of the women are devastated when reading the book and at the same time come away reassured. They all tell me that they finally have in their hands a tool that can allow them to fight back when they are told in a rather peremptory manner that ultimately this violence is less important than they say, that feminists are exaggerating and hysterizing the debate. This book is also a reinforced sisterhood because male researchers, activists, journalists and artists produce speeches that prove that we can act together and change the paradigm.

In Switzerland in particular, however, we are far from it. Criminal prosecution authorities and official statistics still refrain from using the term femicide. Why do you think?

In my opinion, femicide sheds light on the mythology on which many of our European and Western countries are built, which are based almost by nature on equality between women and men. Femicide impacts this discourse, which is why we took it into account very late in our societies. My second explanation would be that we have confined it to a very reductionist vision: an individual, domestic crime, which is always presented as the work of derogant men, therefore either monsters, or perverts, or men who are registered in toxic masculinity. This allows us to clear other men as well as societies as a whole when we know that femicide affects all societies, all social classes, all religious faiths, all skin colors, all ages. From a state point of view, it also makes sense to say that this is a problem that can be confined. If we only count femicides according to this definition, in France since the start of the year there have been 119 (editor’s note: 26 in Switzerland in 2021 according to the stopfemizid.ch research project). But if we count all the men who kill women in their family, the lesbophobic, transphobic murders, the murders of prostitutes… and if we add to the count all the little girls who are victims of incest, infanticide, etc. we are dizzy.