Transforming feminicidio: Framing, institutionalization and social change

This article analyses the transformation of femicide from an academic concept into a frame for political struggle, and into a crime in the context of Mexican feminist activism against the murders of women, or feminicidios, in Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua City. Through analysis of interviews with Mexican activists, the author argues that the implications of the transformations of feminicidio for social change are tied to the interplay between the transnational and the local impacts of feminist human rights advocacy. Drawing on Myra Marx Ferree’s work on the ‘resonance’ and ‘radicalism’ of feminist frames, the article’s findings challenge the straightforward association of radical social change to transnational advocacy and its attendant framing of social problems in terms of international human rights norms. Contrary to existing scholarship on transnational human rights advocacy, the article shows that feminicidio constitutes a resonant frame transnationally, but operates as a radical frame domestically. The dissonance between the transnational and national framing of feminicidio has complicated the ways in which Mexican feminists can engage with the state after the institutionalization of feminicidio as a crime to produce radical social change for women’s everyday experiences of violence and their access to justice.