Soften in The world, neologisms appear firmly framed in circumspect quotation marks. The word femicide did not escape this rule when it was used for the first time twenty years ago. The term has now become sadly common. It is used regularly in our columns (in seventy articles in 2023 alone).
Its definition is not yet completely stabilized. This is demonstrated by the recent dispute between the Minister of Justice, Eric Dupond-Moretti, and feminist associations over the number of marital feminicides perpetrated in France last year: the first was delighted with their decline; the seconds criticized the Keeper of the Seals for understating the figures through a restrictive vision of the term.
But at least the reality that the expression describes – women are killed because they are women – is no longer hidden behind vague meanings, such as homicide.
Flanked therefore by these careful quotation marks, the word entered into The world on September 11, 2003, well after having been forged in English (femicide) by the South African sociologist and feminist Diane Russell, in 1976. It appears in the daily newspaper through an analysis by the journalist Paulo A. Paranagua on human rights in Latin America.
The city of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, is the scene of hundreds of murders of women, which an association describes as “serial sexual feminicide”, thus written with a generic singular on the model of genocide.
The term returns on October 28, 2004 in the mouth of the Algerian feminist Wassyla Tamzali, interviewed by Sylvain Cypel: she notes the deterioration of the status of women in her country under the weight of “mosque speeches become aggressively feminicidal”. The word is still being searched for.
For several years, it was mainly used to describe the assassinations of women in Latin American countries. This is how Robert Belleret, special envoy to Guatemala City, describes, on December 18, 2004, the murders of four hundred and fifty women in a few months. On June 9, 2007, Claire Guillot used it to discuss an exhibition by photographer Guillaume Herbaut, who documented the crimes of Ciudad Juárez.
The reality contained in this word soon crosses the ocean. After the rape and murder of his daughter in Argentina, Jean-Michel Bouvier, a French official at the budget ministry, published an article on October 6, 2011, titled: “Recognizing the crime of feminicide.” The father went there, to the body of Cassandra, his massacred child. “The idea imposed itself on me that the sequence of acts committed first against her freedom as a woman and finally against her life deserved a specific qualification,” he writes.
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