The War Against Women

Recent decades of neoliberal rule have seen authoritarian turns in many governments, and these decades have also been marked by increasing violence against women. The systematic killing of women in Ciudad Jurez, Mexico, has given way to a violent surge that is worldwide in its scope, concentrated in places where the states traditional, sovereign functions have broken down. Femicide is no longer just an intimate event: it has become anonymous and systematic, a crime of power. An intensified form of capitalism, the product of a colonial modernity that is still with us, now fuels new wars on women, which destroy society while targeting womens bodies. Understanding this new, violent turn within patriarchywhich Rita Segato considers the primal form of human dominationmeans moving patriarchy from the margins to the center of our social analysis. According to Segato, it is only by revitalizing community and repoliticizing domestic space that we can redirect history towards a different destiny. At stake is nothing less than the future of humanity.