ABSTRACT
Frustrated with the gender-neutral discourse commonly employed in discussions of murderous violence more generally, feminist legal scholars advanced arguments in favour of using the term ‘femicide’. As might be expected, there has been a wide-ranging debate about the definition of femicide/feminicide and its usefulness as a category in criminology, human rights and legal spheres with differing opinions. The cultural narratives position themselves within the cacophony of competing official voices that seek to name and define feminicidio in Juarez and as such, they can be interpreted as writing, painting, singing and performing back to those sanctioned (hi)stories. The relationship between art and transformation and indeed how cultural texts ‘mean’ illuminates the time-honoured tensions between aesthetics and politics rehearsed at length in the work of scholars within cultural studies including key figures such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, already mentioned.
