Femicide as infrastructure: A comparative feminist analysis of the United Kingdom and South Africa

Femicide, the gender-related killing of women, is increasingly recognised as a patterned form of violence rather than a series of isolated acts. Yet it is still most often analysed through incident-based, legal or epidemiological frameworks that obscure the structural conditions under which women's deaths become predictable and recurrent. This article advances a feminist theoretical intervention by conceptualising femicide as infrastructure: a durable configuration of material deprivation, institutional governance and symbolic normalisation through which women's exposure to lethal violence is systematically produced and sustained. Drawing on feminist theories of violence, intersectionality, structural power and decolonial feminist thought, the article develops an analytical framework that shifts attention away from individual perpetrators and episodic failures towards the ordinary social, political and economic arrangements that render femicide foreseeable. Through a comparative analysis of the United Kingdom and South Africa, the article demonstrates how distinct national contexts instantiate shared patriarchal logics through different infrastructural forms: the United Kingdom as a site of visibility without transformation, and South Africa as a context of extreme violence shaped by inequality, historical violence and institutional fragmentation. Rather than positioning these cases within a Global North/South hierarchy, the article argues that femicide operates through a shared global grammar of gendered power. By theorising femicide as infrastructure, the article contributes to feminist theory by foregrounding durability, reproduction and differential grievability in the production of gendered death, and by offering a diagnostic framework for transnational feminist critique beyond reactive models of prevention and response.