ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we take a transnational approach “from below” to examine the relationship between femicide/feminicide and colonialism and its implications for decolonising feminist activism and scholarship. This approach centres the voices and experiences of racialised and Indigenous women in the Global South and North. It also incorporates an intersectional perspective that views femicide/feminicide as the outcome of multiple, mutually constitutive and reinforcing violences that encompass interpersonal acts as well as institutional and structural processes and systemic inequalities. The chapter reviews the scholarship on femicide in Palestine, feminicide and Indigenous women in Mexico, and missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls as genocide in Canada. We examine various understandings of the relationship between colonialism and the killing of racialised and Indigenous women and girls while pointing to the limits of the concepts of femicide/feminicide when they fail to take into consideration colonialism and its attendant violence seriously. The documentation of these women’s experiences of violence at the local level may revert this omission. In turn, building transnational alliances between activists and scholars may facilitate the exchange of advocacy strategies and alternative rights discourses to dismantle the universalist and homogenising gaze of hegemonic feminism. Such a transnational perspective “from below” may arguably serve as a platform for bridging the political and epistemic distance that often exists between Indigenous and racialised women’s activism and feminist projects. Likewise, it can contribute to challenging states’ use of women’s human rights discourses as a mechanism to disqualify Indigenous ways of life and knowing.
