As the title suggests, my analysis of sexist violence seeks to focus attention on the reading of one of the various factors that intertwine and affect the occurrence of this type of violence, namely, structural violence. To merely highlight some aspects of structural character within the institution of the social would be foreign to an objectivism or an extrinsic determinism from which individual behaviors and intersubjective relationships can be explained. Here, the focus is rather placed within a conception of the institution of the social as a meaningful construction of a practical-discursive nature in whose process the construction of referents of meaning, such as sexual difference, plays the role of primary signifier. This primary signifier gives rise to patterns not only of perception, representation and appreciation of the body and of a subjective identity, but also to equivalences that serve as axes of interpretation and interaction with the material and social worlds;Footnote 1 in other words, axes of orientation, of understandings of the environment, of symbolization, and of adaptation to such worlds. The primary signifier also generates regulatory axes that guide the most diverse forms of social interaction which in turn enable the stabilization of practices and their configuration as institutionalized forms.
Such forms, institutionalized in their materiality, give structure to regulations and practices that strengthen the continuity, stability and legitimacy of these significative and regulatory referents.
Hence, focusing attention on the role of structural violence has the purpose of investigating how the epochal changes faced today at the societal, institutional, and structural levels reproduce and/or reconfigure an order that is symbolically and in practice articulated by sex-gender differences and by the forms of inequality and violence that are concomitant to them; it also seeks to investigate specifically in which sense these changes in the functionality and effectiveness of institutions, together with the mechanisms that have typically strengthened that order, can account for sexist violence being on the rise.
It should be clarified that I am not attempting an empirical analysis of these sociological and institutional changes, but starting a reflection based on the observation of some of those epochal changes, which can allow us to think about their role in the persistence of structural violence and the current upsurge in sexist violence. With this, some progress may be made in establishing how these changes have a differential impact on the occurrence and functionality of sexist violence.
For a first approach to our problem, I refer to the data contained in official records. According to international parameters (WHO), over the past years Mexico has exceeded the average number of deaths by homicide in the world. In a particularly critical period—the first quarter of 2017—the official records registered 7,727 victims apart from other forms of human casualties through kidnapping, disappearance, torture, and rape. It is significant that among these different forms of human casualties, the price paid is practically the same among groups immersed in criminal practices as among members of civil society (see Informe Bourbaki 2011).Footnote 2
In official instances, on media channels, and in public opinion, high-impact crimes and forms of violence tend to attract the most attention, which contrasts with other forms of violence, such as discrimination, physical, sexual, economic, and psychological violence that impact the lives of women, but also in those of infants, the elderly, ethnic groups, groups of sexual diversity, or people with some disability.
Faced with such a situation, one should ask which social and cultural guidelines explain why so little attention or relevance is given to these phenomena, especially if we take into account two aspects that stand out in official records.Footnote 3 First, violence against women is a generalized pattern that is reflected in overwhelming figures—although such figures are far from recording the total number of cases. For example, 63 out of every 100 women have experienced some type of violence at least once in their life; a pattern that accounts for repeated occurrences, but also for how different types of violence overlap in different public and private fields of action and types of social relationships. A second aspect is that these acts of violence occur in all states of the country, where, despite some numerical differences, an incidence level above 50% has been recorded.
The sense of this record is glaringly reflected with regard to the extreme form of violence that is femicide which, despite the enactment of the General Law on Women´s Access to a Life Free of Violence in 2007, has continued to grow on average by 155%. Here, the ineffectiveness and particularly the resistance on the part of official instances to investigate cases of femicide should be highlighted: an average of ten murders of women has occurred every day in recent years.Footnote 4
The generalized violence and insecurity prevailing in Mexico seems to mark a growth pattern that some specialists have analyzed as a “social epidemic.” Along with the methodologies used in the health sector to detect its occurrence and propagation, there is at the social level an inescapable need to attend to the structural factors that both favor and inhibit the spread of the epidemic (see Guerrero Reference Guerrero2012). While these analyses appeal to the same methods to explain the failure of official policies to combat drug gangs head-on—and go on to question use on the streets by authorities of the military but neglect to include the spread of violence in different geographical points of the territory in their calculations, and do not generate mechanisms to control the multiplication of violence or the intricate plot of criminal modalities, with the subsequent cost in safety that the population as a whole has been facing—we could retain the notion of a social epidemic of violence to reflect not only upon the context of social disarray that reigns in the country today as a result of erroneous policies, but also to investigate in what sense this contributes to the current rise in sexist violence figures, among other forms of violence. We could also analyze, beyond conjunctural contexts or trends, which structural factors explain the existence of this type of violence and give it its specificity, how it intermingles with other forms of violence, and what factors favor its repeated and growing manifestation.
Sexist violence shows a repetitive and generalized pattern across time, supported by high numbers. This would be enough to justify understanding it beyond the level of interpersonal relationships. Although the deliberate nature of the aggressor’s actions is the basis for criminalizing and punishing it, the possibility of designing intervention strategies that discourage such forms of violence, and remedy the damage inflicted on the victims and on social order as a whole, implies identifying and taking account of the variables that tend to be involved.
1. Articulation of symbolic violence and structural violence
In order to address the questions raised above, it is essential that their analysis transcend forms of direct violence consisting of harmful actions against others, exercised by, and/or attributable to identifiable individuals or groups, and instead rely on the notion of structural violence, for whose interpretation I rescue some lines of thought that are relevant to our problem from the conception proposed by Galtung. For Galtung, structural violence is a result of how the structure of society is built, wherein different forms of violence can be integrated—misery, alienation, repression—creating, through institutional mediations, conditions that lead to forms of violence involving different modalities. One relevant aspect to underline, for my purposes, is that structural violence in this sense is a network of violence characterised by the damage it causes at an individual and social level, and not by the intentionality of some agent that has been attributed or determined as the cause, or by the fact that the specific aspect that originates the damage or obstacle – to the satisfaction of needs that make human fulfilment possible – can be identified from the beginning. To which we must add, as Galtung argues, that structural violence tends to be at the core of many of the expressions of direct violence (see Galtung Reference Galtung1975).
The types of violence that structure societies to limit or block their citizens access to material and/or socio-cultural resources essential to survival or human development, or deprive them of their liberties, can be expressed in tangible or identifiable forms and be the product of certain forms of socioeconomic and socio-political organization. However, they cannot be fully explained as a mere result of the scarcity of resources or inadequate distributive policies, nor of derived regulations set in place to expand or restrict liberties in one social sector or another. These are types of violence that are intertwined and respond to mechanisms and encodings that evidently have deeper roots and are not easily detectable because they underlie the very construction of meaning; they are naturalized mechanisms structured by social practices, and they codify the very forms that sanction these behaviors.
Indeed, the codifications of a symbolic order are at the base of the organization of collective life and make possible the institution of the social as a construction of meaning that provides guidelines for intelligibility models, value structures, and the classification and ruling of behaviors; models according to which institutional forms, as well as devices intended to shape our bodies and subjectivity, and devices to convey values and aspirations, are designed. Among these mechanisms and codifications, the sex/gender system has a marked roleFootnote 5 and is one of the ways of configuring symbolic violence entrenched by structural violence. Symbolic violence can be interpreted according to the conceptualization developed by Bourdieu:
symbolic violence, a gentle violence that is imperceptible and invisible even to its victims, is exerted for the most part through the purely symbolic channels of communication and cognition; more precisely, misrecognition, recognition, or ultimately, feeling. … [giving rise to a paradoxical submission] … the logic of domination exerted in the name of a symbolic principle known and recognized by both the dominating and dominated parties—a language (or a pronunciation), a lifestyle (or a way of thinking, speaking and acting)—and, more generally, a distinctive trait, whether it be an emblem or a stigma, whose symbolically most powerful and effective quality is that perfectly arbitrary and non-predictive bodily property … (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu2001, 1–2)
Within the theoretical analyses developed on the sex-gender system, Joan Scott explains that gender is a constitutive element of social relations, while the differentiating logic that sustains semiolinguistic formations and the construction of meanings, “that sexual difference is a primary way of signifying differentiation. Gender, then, provides a way to decode meaning and to understand the complex connections among various forms of human interaction” (Scott Reference Scott1986, 1070).
This primary character of gender, in the construction and decoding that operate according to a logic of differentiation, produces effects not only in the level of meaning but also in power relations. In this regard, Scott argues that
gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power [in other words] … gender is a primary field within which or by means of which power is articulated. Gender is not the only field, but it seems to have been a persistent and recurrent way of enabling the signification of power in [certain] traditions … (Scott Reference Scott1986, 1069)
From the perspective of the construction and dynamics of social structure, Scott´s statements allow me to evoke some aspects of the notion of structure developed by Giddens since they are productive for my purposes. It could be argued that the two aforementioned typical elements of gender - that is, primary form of signification, and primary signifying form of power- operate as “structuring principles” that—in Giddens´s terminology—can “constrain” and “enable” social agents because they operate as rules and as principles of social structure. Indeed, sexual difference has both a significant and a practical dimension, since it forms an inherent part of the rules as codes of significance and regulatory elements and contributes to shaping certain elements as a resource of authority and in controlling the resources of assignement on the basis of which practices are produced and reproduced. According to Giddens, the space-time extension of such practices gives rise to the stabilization of social relations and institutionalized forms, but this follows the assumption that continuity and sedimentation are possible and functional because it means that certain properties or structural principles operate as forms of domination and power that make the reproduction of societal totalities possible (see Giddens Reference Giddens1984).
In this regard, as suggested above, what I am interested in sustaining is that the kind of symbolic violence that relies on the differentiating logic of the sex-gender system, that codifies signifying constructions and criteria of distinction and evaluation, and articulates power relations in a primary form, has a symbolic-discursive, practical-discursive aspect, because such configurations build institutionalized social life and guide the practical dimension they entail. Thus, the function of structuring principles of social systems is embodied in a matrix through which the forms of structural violence are ruled, in conjunction with regulations that come from certain forms of socioeconomic and socio-political organization.
Regarding these rules, which are signification codes, such as the construction of order, it is important to emphasize that the order of signifiers is not conceivable without determining limits,Footnote 6 and gender differentiating referents, despite their contingency and arbitrariness, turn the feminine signifier into a condensation of the limit—as the other of normality, of continuity, and of order itself—a limit that serves in its negativity as the seat and support for the articulation of forms of valuation, hierarchization, exclusion, and that should be regulated and controlled as the guarantee of the persistence of order for which domination is the resource par excellence. The efficacy of power for these purposes lies not only in the provision of authority and assignment resources, but also in the dynamics of ritualization and symbolization that reinforces the establishment of certain forms of perception, value scales, and behavioral patterns, and guarantees rule assimilation by both the dominated and the dominator.
A clarifying elaboration on the function fulfilled by these differentiating gender referents in the symbolic economy of societies, and on the specific role of the feminine signifier, is the one developed by Segato through her analysis of the role of the status systemFootnote 7 whose logic permeates the social organizations of traditional communities but persists and infiltrates modern-contemporary forms of organization governed by a contract system. The logic of the status system is associated with hierarchical social structures, in which resources of authority, prestige, property, and power are differentially and asymmetrically distributed; these differences are irreducible and are entrenched in patterns of morality. This logic of status is embodied in the asymmetric order of genders, in which an unequal attribution of esteem for the feminine, given its significance as the seat of the limit, causes the control exercised by the communities over women and over the female body to be the way in which it “inscribes its mark of cohesion.” As Segato argues, the morality and unity of the group is played out in this form of control, so that “There is a balance and proportionality between the dignity, consistency and strength of the group and female subordination” (Segato Reference Segato2003, 10).
Hence, any indication that questions or destabilizes a naturalized order intended to be fixed and unquestionable, whether it is attributable or not to the conduct of women, makes them the target of more intense control and submission practices, whose level of violence may be in proportion to the threat faced—whether alleged or real. What stands out in these forms of organization is that the cultural assignment of roles, segregated practices, and devaluation codes are not only consolidated through the symbolic and structural violence entailed by these regulatory systems, but also contribute to fostering and legitimizing different forms of aggression and can encourage more radical types of violence.
The type of violence that is inscribed in the gender system itself, and is articulated and solidified in traditionalist social structures, is recycled in modern societies. Segato´s research helpfully aims to explain the ethology of gender violenceFootnote 8 operating beneath the tensions between the status system and the contract system. In the understanding that the logic of any contract operates according to criteria of rationality objectified in laws which are guarantors of equal conditions, the persistence of legal figures impregnated with moralizing criteria could not be more paradoxical when it comes to judging violence against women, as stated by the author in her analysis of the laws that use
the legal figure of violent indecent assault. By opting for this focus in its act of nomination [or naming], the law is disposed, once again, to watch over the heritage and family inheritance which pass through the female body, [i.e. as values that make the female body its site], and not through the person of the attacked woman. Accordingly, rape and violent indecent assault are … crimes against morals and not crimes against the person. Here, in the legal discourse, the condition of women as status-object, status-instrument of lineage and inheritance, status-dependent and linked to masculine honor is confirmed. (Segato Reference Segato2003, 8).
The forms of domination that make possible social reproduction according to the logic of status with regard to the economy of masculine power are exercised through the “expurgation of women,” to which practices of control over their bodies are a testimony, including rape, resulting in the assertion of superiority and prestige of the perpetrator and in the reproduction of the gendered codes that structure the social order.
Segato, particularly in this investigation based on the testimonies of men imprisoned for the crime of rape, is in a position to conclude that this “moralizing” functions according to the perception of the perpetrators, that is, to discipline—in a strongly perverted manner—those who defy traditional morality with their behavior.
However, although this moralizing function persists as a violence-trigger mechanism, it is only one of that violence´s triggering sources. Therefore, in order to approach the understanding of the modalities and degrees of sexist violence that proliferate today to alarming levels, we need to focus on the various sources that encourage it and the different functions to which it seems to respond, where an in-depth analysis of these aspects is crucial if we are to gain a better understanding of current scenarios.
2. Structural changes: new social contexts and functions of sexist violence
In the face of the transformation and also the disruption of institutional “normality” and the established repertoires of economic, social, and cultural organization as a result of globalization processes and neoliberal economic policies, it is important to identify some of the contextual factors which result in forms of social disarrangement.
In this regard, for interpretative purposes—and without claiming to be exhaustively explanatory—I will address three scenarios that can be read as sources of sexist violence and that, structurally speaking, can explain its marked increase.
First scenario
Let us think of the scenarios produced by globalizing dynamics and neoliberal economic policies, with the establishment of tendencies of social fragmentation, diversification of sources of power, flexibility of organizational and regulatory procedures, and institutional weakening. In conjunction with structural adjustment policies these cause the implementation of highly permissive legal reforms or the imposition of openly illegal procedures. Neoliberal policies of withdrawal from institutional frameworks are applied, and such policies leave social agents exposed to the logic of the market, or else leave them adrift, displaced, or undocumented. This brings us to confront a decline in levels of well-being, a reduction in the range and quality of inclusion opportunities. This is reflected in the systemic trend of unemployment, the proliferation of informal economic practices as a means of survival, or the flows of internal and external displacement of large sections of the population for economic reasons, because of violence and insecurity, and/or armed conflicts.Footnote 9
Based on the study by Philippe Bourgois, let us consider the trends of increasing inequality, marginalization and proliferation of informal and even criminal economic practices in the light of the dynamics of migrant communities segregated in ghettos, such as that of Puerto Ricans in East Harlem in New York, where factors such as colonial dependency, racial marking, and the condition of poverty produce depressed and uncontrolled urban spaces. These trends are of great interest in themselves for the analysis at hand, but also because of the attitudinal and evaluative patterns which in some senses are prototypical for the problem addressed. In this regard, Philippe Bourgois carried out a highly revealing ethnographic study of the survival strategies practiced by marginalized populations, where the scarcity of alternatives poses the sale of street drugs as a way out. The research accounts for the formation of a street culture where the sum of historical disadvantages of which this population is a carrier is felt in all its harshness; the hostile experience of migration within a racialized and classist context is reflected in the experience of marginalization and further materializes in the low quality of opportunities to be found in the labor market, in educational services, health, and housing.
Although numerous features stand out in such cultural formations, including the patterns of extreme violence that go hand in hand with a clandestine economy, this research highlights that “in street culture, it seems that the rejection of marginalization by centers of power has, in the United States, led to the construction of an identity that offers a sense of opposition to the establishment” (Bourgois Reference Bourgois2003, 288). This aspect can be seen in practices that break out against the framework of legality, in aggressive attitudes and manifestations of bravado that violate forms of civility and seek disruptive forms of affirmation to escape frustration, failure, and vulnerability.
This condition of marginality, often experienced as dislocation and uncertainty stemming from a lack of opportunities due to poverty, and because it describes being the target of different forms of social and institutional violence, is a reality experienced by countless population groups in the world, specifically in Latin America, which allows us to extrapolate some of the theses raised throughout this research, and which are supported by many other studies on the region.
These unfavorable contexts condition changes in lifestyles, socialization, and a redefinition of cultural patterns expressed in the recourse to segregated jobs, internalize unemployment, develop informal economic practices where the border between legality and illegality seems to have been diluted, or to overtly lead to criminal practices. These changes appear in those forms of socialization in which traditional networks of family, community, or class solidarity have been broken and where forms of stark competition are sharpened and often followed—particularly in middle-aged and youth sectors—as Salama states, by “fragmented solidarities or ruptures, maintained by belonging to street gangs and established by respect for certain codes” (Salama Reference Salama2008, 91).
Men who are linked through these forms of socialization seem to find in them ways of compensation that are not offered by family, school, or work. Coming from disintegrated families, as school dropouts and lacking a nucleus of labor socialization, their deprivation—which poses demands and challenges that intensify their lack of resources and vulnerability in these different areas—makes their participation in gangs an opportunity to find an alternative nucleus that gives them a sense of belonging, the possibility of creating an alternative as well as a collective identity. These are organizations that respond to codes of loyalty and in which there is a hierarchical distribution of roles guided by codes of power and violence as the basis for relationship.
In research on the Nuyorican—the young Puerto Rican men in East Harlem as heads of households—it is revealed that the economic failures and social marginalization of US-American post-industrial society is experienced “as a dramatic assault on their sense of masculine dignity” (Bourgois Reference Bourgois2003, 215). Economic inequalities and imposed hierarchies of power are experienced as a grievance, so the pattern of reaction that gives rise to anger and frustration is violent behavior operating on racist and sexist lines that also leads to self-destructive conduct.
A decoding of social, economic, and cultural exclusion as an experience of insult to virility falls into the logic of habitus, that is, the construction of bodies, of ways of perceiving and of beliefs that run according to differentiating symbolic strategies. Masculine integrity is condensed into virile affirmation and, in sublimated form, public and private masculine sexuality becomes an expression of potency, virility, and honor. It is the affirmation of virility integrally associated with an agonistic logic whose expression is conceived as acts of domination.Footnote 10
The economy of emotions and the attitudinal patterns that become manifest among those who suffer these unfavorable conditions reveal the ways in which a historical and cultural legacy of forms of patriarchal power, prestige, and “respect” survives, in a contradictory way, in the street culture of East Harlem. According to BourgoisFootnote 11 , the memory of personal merit persists in terms of the patriarchal power that respects family size, is able to maintain such a condition. and commands respect from family members. In this context, however, these forms of prestige are unattainable.
One of the ways of clinging to a violated patriarchal power is to aggressively assert it through domestic violence and sexual violence. In domestic relationships, the cultural legacy of inequality between the sexes is recycled, through negligence by not taking responsibility or failing to provide resources for the support of the children and the household, as well as through forms of misogynistic violence against the partner. But these practices are currently intensifying: “Street culture and the underground economy provide men with an alternative forum for redefining their sense of masculine dignity through promiscuity, conspicuous violence, and ecstatic substance abuse” (Bourgois Reference Bourgois2003, 288).
In this scenario, it is important to highlight three issues: first, patriarchal violence does not fulfill a moralizing function solely or centrally. It rather acts as a symptom of failure, of impotence, a symptom that nonetheless seeks to strengthen the hierarchy of gender order. Secondly, a wounded machismo that imposes a radicalization of patriarchal violence on the street, according to the codes of the ghetto and its gangs, subjects women to predatory violence such as gang rape. It is noteworthy that, within the dynamics of a ghetto, women who have been the object of these forms of aggression can end up becoming the intimate partner of one of the rapists who attacked them and find themselves inserted in the circle of domestic violence. And, thirdly, an affirmation of masculine “dignity” is achieved through distorted means.
In this regard, there is alignment in my reading of Bourgois and Segato´s perspectives, both in terms of how contemporary forms of precarious life are those that block the fulfillment of the male mandate and leave them powerless (see Vizzi and Ojeda Garnero Reference Vizzi and Ojeda Garnero2017), acting as a trigger of violent behaviors—a formulation with which I agree—and, regarding the predatory affirmation of gang members through mass rape, which would explain the relational and interlocutory dimension between peers that stages the demonstration of power and violence as an expression of virility and as a pact of brotherhood. (Segato Reference Segato2006).
The ways of affirming subjectivity in otherwise adverse conditions are significant, as recorded in the testimonies collected by Bourgois. Economic demands—according to his interviewees—are not the only ones that drive these sectors to sell drugs: “Like most humans on earth, in addition to material subsistence, they are also searching for dignity and fulfillment” (Bourgois Reference Bourgois2003, 334).
Therefore, we could affirm that, underlying these forms of confrontation with society and institutions, is the search for respect, which, moreover, reveals two connotations of the term respect, namely, that these individuals seek “to be looked at carefully” (Díaz and García 2008, 9),Footnote 12 to be considered as equals facing the experience of humiliation and exclusion. That same experience of an unequal attribution of esteem caused by structural and symbolic violence is signified, in their gender condition, as a violated virility that seeks out channels to impose itself upon the group, in the manner of predatory power. Through this respect is asserted in the traditionalist sense: by acting according to authoritarian and exclusive criteria.
Second scenario
It could be considered that, following the current global structural and societal trends, one sociological effect is depersonalization—one of the premises on which the logic of efficiency and instrumentalism of neoliberal economies are based. Thus, even in contexts where social groups are not the most vulnerable nor excluded, as analyzed above, a generalized experience of disadvantage prevails due to the experience of being expendable, which overloads the thresholds of resistance to uncertainty and frustration.
These are conditions that lead to the stress and irritation embodied in climates of growing and generalized aggressiveness and distrust at all levels of social life, conditions that—as the subject of research on the transformation of social questions in today´s societies (Saraví Reference Saraví2009)—set the stage, in my opinion, for them to be considered as one of the contributors to the upsurge in sexist violence. According to official reports, high figures of violence against women in both private and public spaces prevail. In the dominion of domestic violence, it is recorded that in 47% of the cases women are exposed to violence at the hands of their intimate partners, and with respect to other forms of violence, such as emotional, physical, sexual, patrimonial violence and labor discrimination, in 45% of the cases it is inflicted by relatives, acquaintances, strangers, either at school, work, or on the street.
In the case of domestic violence, there are field studies that validate this interpretation. In the face of changes in gender roles within household dynamics which emerge, partly due to economic precariousness, it is observed that
working with the theory of status inconsistency as framed in the theories of family violence, it has been found that couples who are threatened by the absence of resources or perceive an inconsistency in their status with their intimate partner as regards social standards, are more likely to use violence. (Casique Reference Casique, Castro and Casique2008, 234)Footnote 13
In the face of conditions that exacerbate unfavorable inclusion, among whose effects are important readjustments in social gender roles, the proliferation of sexist violence in all areas—according to the thesis proposed above—rather than being an unequivocal expression of patriarchal power, responds as a symptom of failure, given that it is an expression of impotence reacting to the experience of being or feeling out of place.
Third scenario
I will now describe how a third scenario bifurcates into two modes of sexist violence.
As to the first modality, in setting forth the advantages of retaining the notion of a social epidemic of violence both to reflect on the context of social disarray prevailing in Mexico as well as to investigate in what sense this trend contributes to the upsurge in gender violence figures, I consider the structural and societal dynamics described above, and which have transformed institutional, organizational, and social frameworks, to be an integral part of the problem. However, these reasons seem insufficient if we intend to deal with the question brought up by different voices as to why such violence exists in Mexico, when the reality is that most countries are immersed in these structural transformations, while others have black economy businesses embedded in their economies, and yet they do not necessarily face comparable levels of violence.
Hence, it is necessary to think about the ways in which contemporary trends interact with old inadequacies, such as endemic poverty, significant levels of socio-cultural exclusion, and cultural traditions of detachment from the law and distrust of institutions, fueled by the venal practices of the authorities. These are traditions in which conflicts are not processed through civil means, neither by individuals nor authorities that repeatedly violate the procedures, rights, and human rights of those governed, which in itself leads to violent outcomes.
To think through one of the modes of operation of sexist violence, it is essential to start from the conditions of subordinate globalization in which Mexico is immersed, which impact in such a way that intended opportunities go hand in hand with great imbalances in the distribution of resources and risks, causing inequality and endemic poverty to worsen. Larger interdependencies and tendencies toward flexibility and deregulation disrupt and weaken institutional frameworks, thus eroding an already flawed institutional dynamic.
The alignment of these factors with local traditions of illegality and impunity on the part of authorities and society itself are conditions that have contributed to the proliferation of interest groups and criminal groups that skillfully capitalize on the opportunities offered to them by new scenarios and who challenge the authorities and institutions, thereby hurting society. They are also, in significant proportion, groups nourished by the masses of those expelled from the social system and young people who are recruited from precariousness, frustration, and exclusion, causing not only the ranks of an underground economy but also violent death statistics to rise.
The very fragmentation of broad domains of authority and the weakening of institutions invite illegal behavior to flourish, impunity to rise, and mistrust and insecurity to grow.
Let us bear in mind that it is the strength of the referents of institutional and legal authority that allows the asymmetry that reinforces the function of authority and the binding force of norms to be consolidated. Therefore, where the institutional apparatus and those who direct it show not only signs of ambiguity, but of loss of control, the effects cannot be less than counterproductive. As Zolo (Reference Zolo1992, 62–63) rightly states, “the more acute the collective perception of the scarcity of ‘security’ as a commodity, the more conflictual the competition between groups will be, because higher levels of ‘social fear’ will tend to lead to higher levels of aggressiveness.”
Undoubtedly, one of the central factors in the crisis of concentration and centralization of power by the Mexican State is reflected in the violent dispute between interest groups and criminal groups, where the common denominator lies in the erratic strategies implemented by the police, thereby repeatedly making the State’s weakness clear and opening the door to spectacular violence. Another factor is that in many cases the authorities and these other groups are one and the same.
Hence, Sayak Valencia (Reference Valencia2010) is correct in characterizing this reality as a form of gore capitalism by explaining how the use of violence as a “marketable practice/tool” becomes entrenched when its multiplication is observed in forms of expropriation of resources, forms of extortion, and contract killing practices, all of which goes hand in hand with a “subculture” that naturalizes violence, promotes a cult of it, and trivializes it.
Among the many types of extreme violence and its victims, we see once again how dystopian ways of asserting power are expressed. These are forms of “machista” violence that take on the character of criminal violence through the appropriation and exploitation of bodies by means of prostitution, human trafficking, and, ultimately, femicide. In the specific study of femicide in Ciudad Juárez carried out by Segato, the author highlights two elements that are at stake in these crimes, namely the dimension of expressiveness and territoriality. She demonstrates how, inscribed in patriarchal logic, there is a symbolic equivalence between the woman’s body and territory. Therefore, in the competition between factions in that particular border area, it can be interpreted that
Through these bodies, mafia corporations communicate and reinforce their power and group cohesion, further relying on the loyalty of the network of people they control … and at the same time exhibit unrestricted and totalitarian domination over the locality, the region and the nation, given that the latter cannot intervene effectively. (Segato Reference Segato2006, 7)
Certainly, femicide in Ciudad Juárez is a problem in which sexist and criminal violence have converged, not as isolated cases but by acquiring a systemic nature that interweaves with institutional violence. The omissions of the authorities at all levels, together with equivocal and ineffective interventions, have not only made them fail to provide truth or justice, but have also encouraged the recurrence of these crimes. Such negligence has also given rise to overflowing levels of impunity which contribute to a general increase in violence, made worse by these authorities’ collusion with paralegal practices.
In short, this constitutes a modality in which the predatory character of machista violence does not have as its destiny, libidinally speaking, the possession of the body and life of women. Those are mere “symbolic instruments of male politics” (see Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu2001, 48–49) as objects that can be commodified to obtain resources, but which most of all communicate power and, in an outstanding way, become the affirmation and exhibition of a criminal force that hegemonizes a territory and whose symbolization is reflected in the disposition-domination-destruction of the female body.
The second mode of operation of sexist violence requires pointing out that the multiplication of femicides, across practically the entire country, in some cases replicates that pattern because of the mafia networks that exist behind them, while in many other cases one of the decisive factors for the rise of this crime. In other ways, there is an absence of official institutions in the prevention of crime, or erratic and complicit forms of intervention by authorities.
Analyses account for this crisis and a weakening of regulatory capacity over legal procedure, functions of authority, and the capacity to exert control: there is a proliferation of antisocial practices that are not regulated, investigated, or sanctioned by the official authorities, thus allowing impunity to become a systemic trend. This contributes to the repetition of violent behavior, through contagion, in an already tense and insecure environment, where intimate partners or strangers who replicate practices of extreme violence feel confident that they will avoid punishment. This amounts to a systemic impunity that contributes to configuring a scenario where atrocity reigns and where media management, official communication, and social networks all play their part by normalizing the problem, thereby exerting an anesthetic and/or blocking impact on social sensitivity, which in turn filters what cannot be processed when stunned. Alternatively, this phenomenon begins to become a social pattern wherein critical and reflective responses are trivialized and blocked.
Reversing the social epidemic of violence seems like an arduous task, if not impossible, since it has been installed in and permeates through practically all areas and social practices, leaving the social fabric seriously torn. Beyond failed strategies there are social effects at the global and local levels that are difficult to alleviate as they are the product of systemic dynamics that seem to go beyond intervention plans or political will. But when we confirm that violence against women is a constant that does not stop either in periods of crisis or in periods of “normality,” but rather increases in certain contexts or situations, it would be worthwhile to weigh up the productivity of deconstructive criticism—where this type of violence becomes a constant by turning women and all bearers of the feminine signifier into a target against whom aggressive tendencies are discharged in an uninhibited manner following discriminatory and “naturalized” patterns, and whose “functionality” confers the same forms of affirmation not only to aggressors but also to the updating of an asymmetrical order. A return to deconstructive criticism is essential, given that the root of sexist violence lies in cultural patterns naturalized and reinforced by institutionalized structures and practices; such critiques should be aimed at dismantling these cultural patterns, making visible and denouncing their illegitimacy, and rejecting the discourses and practices that systematically and recurrently make a dent in the lives of the bearers of the feminine signifier.
More precisely, what is called for is a deconstructive strategy that not only entails a critical-analytical task, but also working hand in hand with the study, disarticulation, and transformation of functions of structures that socially and institutionally gain symbolic strength by contributing to one another’s production and reproduction. It is, in my opinion, a crucial and unavoidable task in which we must not relent, if we consider that an integral part of gender-based violence is naturalization and legitimation, and that these are significations that—as a producing matrix and at the same time a molding matrix—are reproduced and projected in so many other forms of violence that nourish the symbolism of hegemonic masculinity, a symbolism that rests on structures of domination in which violence is intrinsic, and whose impact is felt in economic, institutional, military, as well as criminal dynamics and organization.
Acknowledgements
A first version of this article was previously published electronically in Debates en Paralelo. CIEG/UNAM, 2020. https://debatefeminista.cieg.unam.mx/articulo-violencia-sexista.php; the current version includes minor changes and some figures are updated.
Griselda Gutiérrez Castañeda works as research and teaching of philosophy at the Autonomous National University of Mexico. She has a PhD in philosophy from the same university. She has specialized in political philosophy and gender theory, her lines of research are systemic problems of inequality, exclusion, and violence in contemporary societies, analyzed from a gender perspective. Recently she published Mujeres en el contexto de la globalización. La especificidad y las derivas de su inserción.
