Feminicide and Global Accumulation

Theorizing feminicide as the key epistemic violence at the heart of patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist relations of rule, this powerful text documents Black, Brown, and Indigenous trans and cis women's ongoing resistance and insurgent dreams of bodily integrity and freedom. Weaving together memories, poetry, stories, analysis, art, and activist praxis, Feminicide and Global Accumulation charts a new and irresistible future for anticapitalist feminist struggle. A book that belongs on the bookshelves of all progressive, left, decolonial scholar-activists. -Chandra Talpade Mohanty, author of Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity Feminicide and Global Accumulation tells stories of women reclaiming their histories, their dreams, their lives, and their bodies. It is a view from the ground up of the limitless greed of global corporations who want the last farm, the last seed, and the last mineral. Most importantly, it shows how violence against the Earth and violence against women are interconnected, and how feminicide and ecocide are intrinsic to the structures of global accumulation. Transforming the pain of feminicide into a fight for justice, women are showing how we can create new economies from the ground up, putting people and planet at the center to create buen vivir, the good life for all. -Vandana Shiva, author of Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development and Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace Drawing on concrete experiences and processes, Feminicide and Global Accumulation explains why feminicide is a political category. It shows why social movements are the ones that have made feminicide into a term for naming patriarchal violence in relation to the capitalist and colonial system as a machine of exploitation and cruelty over certain bodies and territories; why struggles have installed the term in the media and in legal classifications at the same time as they use it to denounce patriarchal justice and counter-insurgent strategies. Speaking of feminicide and transfeminicide in relation to global processes of accumulation, as Feminicide and Global Accumulation proposes, makes it possible both to grieve and to refuse its normalization, to create a systematic account of how violence explodes and extracts collective wealth, as well as to connect sexual violence to histories of conquest and genocide. Feminicide and Global Accumulation arises from a collective encounter in Colombia in 2016 that has been vital for conceptualizing and sharing experiences from voices across Abya Yala, of Black, Indigenous, Afro-descendant and Afro-Indigenous women, and non-heteronormative bodies. Thus it is a book that is heard and written in many tongues. It is theory produced in the thickness of a poem, concepts woven into conversation, lines of argument that echo inherited histories, philosophies that carry memories. The effort of its translation and publication in English does justice to the task of introducing a vocabulary that emerges from the struggles of body-territories in their untiring strategies of re-existence. -Veronica Gago, author of Feminist International: How to Change Everything Feminicide and Global Accumulation is a timely and necessary book on one of the most urgent issues facing trans and cis women globally. Centering the voices of Black and Indigenous women, this collection presents rare and much needed insight into the ways that racial capitalism and heterosexism exacerbate the politics of violence against women transnationally. From Colombia to Guinea-Bissau, these reflections dialogically, poetically and passionately demonstrate why Black and Indigenous women matter and why we must do everything in our power to stop racialized gender violence now. -Christen A. Smith, author of Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence and Performance in Brazil Feminicide and Global Accumulation is a searing, unflinching indictment and analysis of gender-based violence and its embeddedness in extant structures of colonialism, modern patriarchy, racism, and capital accumulation. In their own riveting words and voices, Black, Afro-descendant, trans, and Indigenous women, activists, and researchers from across the Americas and the Global South offer stories and theories of the living experiences and memories of the racist, feminicidal violence they and their communities have endured and resisted, and never forgotten, despite the imposed silence of dominant histories. Through them we see the monstrous and intimate scales of the punitive powers women face. But we also see the enormous powers women themselves wield-powers of rebellion, resistance, and re-existence-which are the radical capacities for transformation we can put our hopes in. Harrowing and heartening, moving, humbling, and inspiriting, these are powerful and empowering calls for collective resistance and joy, and renewed life-making against the pedagogies of cruelty directed against the truth of women's rebellion. This book is more than a glimpse of what it will take to remake the world. It shows us that those who now defend life, land, culture, and community are who will lead us into a different future. -Neferti X. M. Tadiar, author of Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization Feminicide and Global Accumulation is a book of the heart and mind, of spirit and memory, and of truth and resistance. By amplifying the voices of Black, Indigenous and women of color living on the frontlines of colonialism and imperialism, this book offers an alarming exposition of the horrors and terrain of contemporary racialized, capitalist accumulation and dispossession-who it targets, under what historical conditions, and the staggering and multiple forms of patriarchal violence necessary for its reproduction. The narratives move through past, present, and future-drawing on ancestral wisdom of place, speaking to the everyday political interventions of feminist freedom fighters in the here and now, and ultimately shaping future feminist resistors rising up from the earth and demanding change. There is no hiding from the haunting accounts of colonial, capitalist violence courageously shared in these pages, or the questions about international solidarity that float to the surface as you read. The transformative power, analytic precision, and deep and uncompromising indictment of our current world captured in the book's pages-and showcased in such painful and beautiful ways- is what we desperately need to think with, to teach, to understand, and to mobilize for collective liberation across the globe. Reading it is like standing on the precipice of change. -Jaskiran Dhillon, author of Prairie Rising: Indigenous Youth, Decolonization and the Politics of Intervention and Associate Professor of Global Studies, The New School