Femicide vs Femicidio vs Feminicidio: On the Transnational Travel and Competition of Feminist Concepts.

This paper examines the transnational travel and competition of two feminist concepts: femicidio and feminicidio. The former is Spanish translation of the term "femicide," defined by Diana Russell as "the killing of females by males because they are female." Feminicidio is an adaptation of "femicide" that Mexican feminist scholars developed in their analyses of the killings of women in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Feminicidio introduces a focus on the complicity of the state in the killing of women by sustaining structural gender and class inequalities at the root of this violence and tolerating its impunity. Feminicidio also became a frame of a transnational feminist movement that began in Mexico, although the use of femicidio versus feminicidio has been hotly debated among feminist activists and scholars. The paper aims to (1) trace the transfer and transformation of "femicide" from its origins in the American academia to Latin America in relation to transnational feminist activism; (2) analyze the relationship between differently positioned feminist experts and their interventions in the UN and regional human rights systems; (3) examine the (potential) impact of the adoption of these competing concepts on feminist policy on violence against women in different national settings. The paper expands the literature on the transnational diffusion of ideas and institutions by examining how the politics behind the production of feminist knowledge shape the processes through which meaning is contested and negotiated as it is transferred to and from different organizational domains in multiple directions and across different scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]