War Against Women

Rita Segato is Emerit Professor at the University of Brasília and is the author of numerous books, including A Critique of Coloniality: Eight Essays.  She was awarded the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021 and the Doctorate Honoris Causa from the University of Salamanca.

“This excellent translation of Rita Segato’s War Against Women is a long-awaited contribution to feminism for English-language audiences. Her brilliance is indispensable and indisputable. She considers violence against women in historical forms, its domestic, public, military, and paramilitary forms, and in its relation to gratuitous cruelty and the formation of masculine subjects. Steeped in the history of violence against women in Latin America, Segato situates this history of violence in a transnational frame, showing the range of powers that seize upon women’s bodies with lethal aggression. That history moves in and out of national boundaries, focuses the analysis of femicide in relation to territory, property, and both state and non-state powers, all of whom mobilize specific and converging forms of violence. Segato shows us how to make the case against this horrific war on women in its legal, historical, and psychological dimensions. One can only feel grateful for this indomitable intellect and remarkable passion as it pursues and renews this political commitment to justice.”Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley

• Foreword – Jelke BoestensPrologue to the Second Edition    Introduction  Theme One: The Centrality of the Question of Gender   Theme Two: Patriarchal Pedagogy, Cruelty, and War Today    Theme Three: What Hides the Role of Patriarchy as the Pillar that Sustains All Powers   Theme Four: Toward Politics in a Feminine KeyThe Writing on the Bodies of Murdered Women in Ciudad Juárez: Territory, Sovereignty, and Crimes of the Second State    Science and Life   The Femicides in Ciudad Juárez: A Criminological WagerEpilogue  Women’s Bodies and the New Forms of WarIntroduction  The Informalization of Contemporary Military Norms    Changes in the Territorial Paradigm    Corresponding Changes in Political Culture, or The Factionalization of PoliticsThe Mafialización of Politics and the State Capture of Crime    Femigenocide: The Difficulty of Perceiving the Public Dimension of War Femicides   Patriarchy, from Margin to Center: Discipline, Territoriality, and Cruelty in Capital’s Apocalyptic Phase    The History of the Public Sphere is the History of Patriarchy    Discipline and the Pedagogy of Cruelty: The Role of High-Intensity, Colonial Modern Patriarchy in the Historical Project of Capital in its Apocalyptic PhaseHistory in Our Hands    Coloniality and Modern Patriarchy Duality and Binarism: The “Egalitarian” Gender Relations of Colonial Modernity and Hierarchy in the Pre-Intrusion Social Order    Femigenocide as a Crime Under International Human Rights Law The Struggle for Laws as a Discursive Conflict   Disputes over Whether or Not to Name   The Struggle to Elevate Femicide to the Legal Status of Genocide Against WomenConditions for Writing Femicide into State Law and Femigenocide into Human Rights LawFive Feminist Debates: Arguments for a Dissenting Reflection on Violence Against Women   The Victimization of Women in War Unequal but Different   On the Role We Assign to the StateHow Not to Ghettoize the Question of Gender Power’s New Eloquence: A Conversation with Rita Segato    From Anti-Punitivist Feminism to Feminist Anti-Punitivism    For an Anti-Punitivist Feminism: Two Wrongs Don’t Make a RightPresentation before the National Senate, April 20, 2017, at the Hearing Called to Assess a Proposal to Impose Harsher Punishments in Response to the Killing of Micaela García on April 1, 2017 For a Feminist Anti-Punitivism: “Femicide and the Limits of Legal Education”By Way of Conclusion: A Blueprint for Reading Gender Violence in Our Times    Conceptual Framework: Gender Asymmetry and What Sustains ItThe Two Axes of Aggression and the Masculine MandateFemicide and Femigenocide    Two Legal Categories Awaiting Recognition in International Human Rights Law    The Importance of a Transnational, Comparative Approach    The Para-State, New Forms of War, and Femigenocide    On the Need to De-Libidinize Sexual Aggression and to See Acts of Gender Aggression as Fully Public Crimes Expressive Violence: The Specificity of the Message, the Capacity for Cruelty, and Territorial Domination Expressive Violence: The Spectacle of Impunity   A Watershed in the History of War The Masculine Mandate and the Reproduction of Military Labor    BibliographyNotesIndex