Gendered Necropolitcs: Inequalities and Femicides in Central America

Abstract

Central America is one of the most violent regions in the world outside of open warfare, with countries such as El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala having some of the highest homicide rates. As a result of this deadly process, El Salvador also has the highest femicide rate in the world. Guatemala and Honduras are also among the ten countries with the highest femicide rates on the planet. As a regional trend, homicides of women have increased at a much higher rate than those of men in recent years. While femicide is a universal phenomenon, there are certain contexts, generated by histories of colonial domination, exclusion, racism, sexist social norms, and the presence of organized crime that drive the conditions for an increase in the rate of femicide. Thus, gender, race, class, age, produce the flesh and bones of the female body whose life is at stake in contexts of multiple expressions of inequality. This chapter will analyze how the multiple systems of inequality in Central America, exacerbated by the pandemic, have ended up producing a lethal context for women or a gender necropolis. That is, a brutally stratified social system whose discourses and practices produce the conditions for some women, particularly young, poor, and racialized women, to be “biopolitically disposable”.