Femminicidio: chi ha paura della differenza?

In this article, Patrizia Violi aims at demonstrating that femminicidio is not a state of emergency but rather one of normalcy. It is a constant presence in the everyday life of gender relations, ubiquitous in the world and at any given time in history, the peak of the iceberg of a much broader and general phenomenon: the domination of male over female. The death of a woman is only the tragic epilogue of a permanent state of violence, which is so varied in its outcomes as it is univocal in its origins. Following a semantic analysis of the term femminicidio, a neologism that has only recently entered the Italian dictionary, Violi proposes a political reading of the phenomenon along the line of current feminist studies. In this framework, femminicidio becomes a political category that can be utilized to interpret reality against the reductive view of the patriarchal logic that fragments and transforms the phenomenon into a series of contingent events, attributable to single individual stories. Femminicidio cannot be reduced to violence against a single woman in a relationship and to her death by her partner or ex-partner. Rather, and particularly in Mexico and Latin America but not only, femminicidio reveals a much more terrible and unsettling reality: the massacre of women as such.