Feminicidal masculinities: Cultural contestations of gender violence in Ciudad Juárez

Whitfield, Joey ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9589-7329 2024. Feminicidal masculinities: Cultural contestations of gender violence in Ciudad Juárez. Thakkar, A., Baker, B. and Harris, C., eds. Border Masculinities, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 213-233. (10.1007/978-3-031-68050-2_11)

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Abstract

The murders of hundreds of women in the border city of Ciudad Juárez stand as testimony to an extreme form of perverse masculinity and misogyny. If, as Jill Radford and Diana E. H. Russell put it, ‘[f]emicide is on the extreme end of a continuum of anti-female terror’ (1992), the scale and violence of the murders in Juárez put them at the extreme end of the extreme end. In a context in which most of the murdered women of Ciudad Juárez are poor, indigenous migrant workers in the US-owned maquiladoras that line the border, the murders have been feminicides—a term that emphasises the intersectional causes of violence and the responsibility of the state. This chapter looks at different forms of masculinity in Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s detective novel Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders (2005) and Carlos Carrera’s film El traspatio (2009). Building on Raewyn Connell’s taxonomy of masculinities and Jack Halberstam’s insight that masculinity ‘becomes legible as masculinity when it leaves the white male middle-class body’ (1998), it argues that both novel and film perform what is termed ‘affective theorising’ on the feminicidal masculinities of perpetrators, the structures that enable them, and anti-femicidal masculinities, including the ‘female masculinities’ that fight back.

Item Type:	Book Section
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Modern Languages
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN:	978-3-031-68049-6
Last Modified:	21 Feb 2025 15:00
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/176336

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