Naming Bodies: What Can Research on Feminicide Teach Us about Psychoanalytic Listening?

With this title, “Naming Bodies,” I intend to use the notion of feminicide to question how psychoanalysts listen to events that seem to bear the mark of structural forms of violence. By examining what is at stake in the construction of a new category, feminicide, that differs from homicide, I aim to understand if such an effort to attribute a name to a specific modality of violence could be useful for psychoanalytical research and practice. As an analyst, should one consider that there are variations on the degrees of vulnerability experienced by subjects, variations that don't refer exclusively to the vicissitudes of their own existence? How does one listen to narratives of misogyny, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, on the couch? This paper aspires to bring new elements for this discussion.

The term femicide was first used in 1976 by activist Diana Russell in the first International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women, held in Brussels. This was a gathering of women from all over the world (2,000 women from 40 countries) to testify about crimes committed against women—the word crime being used to refer to any and all forms of patriarchal and sexist oppression of women.

During this meeting, Diana Russell spoke of femicide and defined it as “a hate killing of females perpetrated by males,” stating that

from the burning of witches in the past, to the more recent widespread custom of female infanticide in many societies, to the killing of women for so-called honor, we realize that femicide has been going on a long time. (Russell, 1976, p. 101)

As examples of femicide, Russell mentions the stoning to death of females; murders of females for so-called honor; rape murders; murders of women and girls by their husbands, boyfriends, and dates, for having an affair, or for being rebellious, or for any number of other excuses; wife-killing by immolation because of too little dowry; deaths as a result of genital mutilations; of female sex slavery, of female trafficking, of prostitution