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updateCSW december 2010

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In the a termath o the montreal massaCre o 1989, i

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1. Jane Caputi and Diana E.H. Russell, Femicide: Speaking the Unspeakable, Femi- cide: The Politics of Woman Killing, ed. Jill Rad ord and Diana E.H. Russell (New York:Twayne Publishers, 1992), 15.

From Misogyny to Mur

by gilDa roDrguez

Everyday Sexism and Femicidein Cross-Cultural Context

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tests 3 and lengthy questioning about mari-tal status and personal plans, because em-ployers avor young, single women who areless likely to miss work due to domesticresponsibilities. 4 The maquiladora model isbuilt on a conception o its workers as dis-posable. The hard physical labor makes it

impossible or most women to work in theindustry or more than a ew years, whentheir bodies can no longer keep up. Therestrictions on pregnancy and marriage,and the lack o accommodations or wom-en with children, make it so the realities o these womens lives are o ten in confictwith their employers expectations, andthus the turnover rate is high. However, thelabor supply is plenti ul, 5 and, aware o thiscompetition, maquiladora workers o tenpre er not to speak up when overworkedor abused, and go to great lengths to hidepregnancies and nd alternative childcarearrangements.

3. A ederal anti-pregnancy discrimination law was onlypassed in 2003, and its en orcement is lax, particularly in

the maquiladora sector. Emily Miyamoto Faber, Preg-nancy discrimination in Latin America: the exclusion o employment discrimination rom the de nition o laborlaws in the Central American Free Trade Agreement,Columbia Journal of Gender and Law , 16 (2007), 307.4. Patricia Fernndez-Kelly, Maquiladoras: The View

rom the Inside, The Women, Gender, and Development Reader, ed. Nalini Visvanathan et al (London: Zed Books,1997), 208; Melissa Wright, The Dialectics o Still Li e:Murder, Women and Maquiladoras, Millennial Capitalismand the Culture o Neoliberalism, eds Jean Comaro andJohn Comaro (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001), 140.

5. Althea J. Cravey, Women and Work in Mexicos Maqui- ladoras (Maryland: Rowman and Little eld, 1998), 72.

Melissa Wright links the disregard orthe value o women in the maquiladoraenvironment to the devaluing o womenslives implicit in the murders. She con-ceptualizes the high rates o turnover asa corporate death o sorts, in which thewomens labor is more valued than the

women themselves. As long as the plantsproduce goods cheaply and e ciently, theowners do not care about who is produc-ing them. As Wright explains, turnoveritsel [] is not necessarily a waste butthe by-product o a process during whichhuman beings turn into industrial waste. 6

The maquiladora workers are disposableand always replaceable. The basic humanrights o a woman, like that o privacy, canbe violated because i she resists such a vi-olation, there will be another worker eagerand ready to take her place.

The disposability o the women, andmore speci cally their bodies, then, iscommon to both the murders and maqui-ladora work. Despite the e orts o local

and international nongovernmental orga-nizations, the murders continue, and thegendered basis or the violence is o tenignored. The already-high incidence o crime in Jurezmuch o it related to thedrug tradehas escalated in recent years,making it di cult to distinguish, in mediaand political narratives, the gender-basedmurders rom ones motivated by other

causes.6. Melissa Wright, Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2006), 83.

Caputi and Russell argue that [m]isog-yny not only motivates violence againstwomen, but distorts the press coverage o such crimes as well. [] The police, me-dia and public response to crimes againstwomen o color, poor women, lesbians,women prostitutes, and women drug users

is particularly abysmalgenerally apa-thy laced with pejorative stereotyping andvictim-blaming. 7 The discourse aroundthe Jurez emicides ollows this pattern:the dark-skinned, working-class emalevictims receive little attention in the Mexi-can national media, and, when they do,they are o ten accused o being loose,as i their perceived morality in some waymakes their deaths acceptable. A prosecu-tor or the state o Chihuahua amouslysuggested implementing a cur ew to stopthe murders, because it would keep goodpeople o the street at night 8implyingthat the lives o so-called loose womenwere expendable. The current president,Felipe Caldern, has remained tight-lipped

on the subject, while devoting consider-able energy (and several trips to Jurez)to drug-related violence. In 2005, hispredecessor, Vicente Fox, accused themedia o sensationalizing crimes that, heclaimed, had been solved and were nolonger a problem. At the same time, themaquiladoras, which deny any connection

7. Caputi and Russell, 15.8. Lourdes Portillo, Seorita Extraviada (New York, NY:Women Make Movies, 2002).

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w y. B p p w s di i c i di by d g , b by ki d, b c ik w c i

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did k w i vic i .11

Much like in the case o Marc Lpine o the Montreal Massacre, certain discoursesunderstand Sodini as crazy or dement-edan anomaly, rather than the most ex-treme orm o a kind o violence that hap-pens every day, thanks to a culture thatallows and supports it. 12 Anne Applebaum,

or examplealso writing onlinesaid thatit was a ludicrous proposition to believethat we are all so inured to the victimiza-tion o the emale hal o the populationthat we dont even notice it anymore. 13

It is precisely this sort o contentionthat I attempt to argue against in this pa-per. There is, in act, in many contexts, a

11. Amanda Marcotte, These Crimes Dont Happen ina Vacuum, Pandagon , August 5, 2009. 12. A writer or the Calgary Herald attacked exactly theproposition I am putting orth here: OK, ladies [] letsnot go there. Lets not turn George Sodini into the newMarc Lepine, the next poster boy or those who insist thatthese sick individuals represent the violence that lives inall mens hearts, Naomi Lakritz, One killer a whole gen-der does not damn, Calgary Herald, August 7, 2009.13. Anne Applebaum, America Is Saturated With Mi-sogyny? Oh, Please, Slate , August 10, 2009.

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generalized culture o disregard, and evenhatred, or women that makes it di cult

or us to understand that emicide does nothappen in vacuum, but is rather just onei extrememani estation in an environ-ment that accepts and osters, to varyingdegrees, behaviors that are degrading anddetrimental to women, including many

orms o violence. In the case o the So-dini emicides, bloggers have identi ed aparticularly insight ul connection betweenhis crime and the culture o the so-calledseduction community, which attemptsto increase mens sexual and romanticconquests through techniques allegedlyderived rom social psychology. Pickupartists are men who have developedskills with the end o success ully seduc-

ing womenthe goal is to seduce as manywomen as possible. This subculture has

grown and gained much attention in re-cent years, with best-selling books includ-ing Neil Strauss The Game, and a realityshow on VH1, The Pickup Artist, that ran

or two seasons (20072008); it is also theinspiration or Will Smiths movie Hitch . Inthe a termath o the Sodini murders, somemembers o the pickup artist communitywrote about how i the gunman had ol-lowed their rules o seduction, he wouldnot have had the sexual rustration that ledto the shooting spree:

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d w by i si yp i [ sic ] b b , d -i g v g c . G c d v v d

iv w s di i ki d.14

14. Game Can Save Lives, Roissy in DC, August 5,

Underlying this sort o claim are twoproblematic assumptions: the rst, that

rustration at the lack o attention romwomen is, i not justi able, at least anunderstandable reason or unleashing thissort o violence; the second has to do withthe presumption that women are highlymanipulableand in act should be ma-nipulated to ul ll mens desires. Pickupartistry might seem like a harmless way

or unlucky-in-love men like George So-dini to get a date, but it is also part o anincreasingly prominent subculture wherewomen matter only inso ar as they sat-is y a mans desires, and where they areinterchangeable with one another. Thegoal o the pick-up artist, as one o them,David DeAngelo, puts it, is to talk to any

2009.

Pickup artistry might seem like a harmless way for unlucky-in-lovemen like George Sodini to get a date, but it is also part of an increasingly prominent subculture where women matter only insofar as they satisfy a

mans desires, and where they are interchangeable with one another.

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woman (emphasis mine); another, MikePilinski, suggests in the title o his populare-book, Shes Yours For the Taking,15 thathis audience can make proprietary claimson the women they desire. The languageo the seduction community urther objec-ti es women: the woman the artist wants

to talk to is the target, while the riendshe is with is the obstacle. With grow-ing media attention on pick-up artistsand their techniques also grew outrage, incertain sectors, about their treatment o women. 16 However, the dominant mediadiscourse suggests that pick-up artistry isharmless and, at best, gives socially awk-ward men a leg up in interactions with theopposite sex. The Los Angeles Times put itthusly: You may not like Neil Strauss newbook, The Game, but hes a hero to menseeking women. 17

The two case studies I present heremight seem mismatched in the magnitudeo both the emicides and the sorts o ev-eryday acts o misogyny I associate with

each o them. However, I believe that, readagainst each other, the emicides o Jurezand Pittsburgh reveal the deep relation-

15 . David DeAngelo Communications, Inc., Double Your Dating ; Mike Pilin-ski, Shes Yours for the Taking (West Seneca, NY: KiplingKat, 2009).16. See, or example, Andrew Johnson, Passing on oolproo pick-up tips. Is this grooming or adults?The Independent, August 28, 2005.

17. Deborah Netburn, Danger: Pickup Artists Ahead,Los Angeles Times, August 31, 2005.

ship that exists, even in markedly di erentcontexts, between the pervasive, but small-scale, misogyny that people in a particularsociety might be inclined to ignore, andmonumentally barbaric acts that, to many,seem to de y explanation. The murdersin Jurez and Sodinis shooting are out o

the ordinary, but they are not anomalies oraberrations: they are simply the most grue-some examples.

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n C ss-C t C nt xt t th 2010 m t n fth W st n P t c Sc nc ass c t n.

some Fem t Blog

http://pandagon.net

http:// em tblog .org/

http://www. em te.u /blog/

http:// em t g.com/

http://the bomb.org/

http://www.ourbod e ourblog.org/

http://www.jezebel.com/

http://www. alo .com/l e/broad-heet/

http://f ally em m101.wordpre .com/

http://www.w m o l e.org/WiMn -vo ce Blog/

http://www. hollaback.org/

http://b tchmagaz e.org/blog

http://www.med ag rl.org/

http://bullyblogger .wordpre .com/

Ph t c d t:On page 15, photo, Pink crosses inOlvera street, Los Angeles, as remembrance for

the murdered women of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico,on the Day of the Dead, by Jim Winstead Jr.,trainedmonkey.com/

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