Entangled with the necropolis: a decolonial feminist analysis of femicide news coverage in Latin America

ABSTRACT

This project examines how Latin American print media discursively construct the issue of femicide/feminicide in the context of rampant judicial impunity, state neglect, neoliberal decimation, and excess violence in the region. We theorize alongside decolonial feminists that call for repeated attention to the ways in which the neoliberal state and its institutional allies are entangled in simultaneously colonial, imperial, white supremacist, ableist, and hetero-patriarchal power formations. Our multimodal critical discourse analysis of 534 news articles from top circulating newspapers spans across the five Latin American countries with highest femicide rates. Through a theoretical lens that engages with necropolitics and gore capitalism, we find that news discourse is a critical site for the neoliberal state’s enactment of necropower, or the ability to name certain bodies as inhuman and thus naturally marked for death. Our findings evidence that Latin American media, through its almost exclusive reliance on governmental frameworks and data, depict femicide as a photo-op to reaffirm state efficiency and power; represent women as vessels empty of human life; construct femicide as inevitable and/or justified; and normalize the commodification of excess violence in the form of gore and the fetishization of cadavers.

KEYWORDS:

• Femicide
• media discourse
• decolonial feminism
• necropolitics
• gore capitalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dominique A. Montiel Valle

Dominique A. Montiel Valle is a Journalism & Media Ph.D. student at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on media representations of Indigeneity and gender, as well as digital activism around issues of racialized and gendered violence in the Latin American context. E-mail: [email protected]

Zelly Claire Martin

Zelly Claire Martin is a Journalism & Media M.A. student at The University of Texas at Austin. She is currently researching the perpetuation of heteropatriarchal gender ideology through media representations of pregnancy loss, as well as digital community-building among women on the topic of reproductive issues. E-mail: [email protected]