Conference
The conference Feminicide = Sanctioned Murder: Race, Gender and Violence in Global Context will examine the murders and disappearances of women in Mexico, Guatemala and Canada that are occurring on an epidemic scale, and interrogate closely the gender, class, sexual and ethnoracial components of this violence against women. The aim and purpose of the conference is to stop the violence and map out ways to bring about justice.
Distinguished participants include Elena Poniatowska, one of Mexico’s most eminent writers, whose innovative writing advocates for women and the poor in their struggle for social and economic justice, and Lydia Cacho, who recently received the 2007 Ginetta Sagan Award for Women and Children's Rights from Amnesty International for exposing a net of pederasts linked to the government and big business, and for creating a shelter for the children, victims of trafficking and abuse in Cancún, Mexico.
The conference, presented by Chicana and Chicano Studies of The Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University, brings together the most knowledgeable experts on the subject of feminicide in recent years, including mothers of murdered and disappeared women, activists, academics, writers and journalists, human rights lawyers, artists and filmmakers.
In Ciudad Juarez alone, across the border from El Paso, Texas, some 400 women have been murdered over the last fourteen years and over 1,000 have been reported disappeared. But this “proliferation of violence on the powerless“ (Fregoso), or “gender extermination” (Lagarde), is not confined to Juarez. From 2001-05 hundreds of women have been violently murdered under similar circumstances throughout Central America: 1,780 in Guatemala, 462 in Honduras, 117 in Costa Rica, 5 per month in El Salvador (Fregoso). In Guatemala, some 700 women a year are being killed with impunity. The recent murders of women in Argentina have been called “crimes with a mark”: carried out with rage, sadism and absolute impunity (Peker). Recently, a conference in Canada revealed that over 100 indigenous women have been murdered in a similar manner.
This conference offers a forum to examine the ethnic and class associations of the gender violence spreading across the hemisphere, but primarily to trace a path to justice.
