Sacrificial Flesh

This article investigates the vicissitudes of the term “femicide” in order to draw out its nuances, elisions, and assumptions to understand its political reach as well as its limits. Ultimately, my aim is to argue that “femicide” cannot sufficiently account for the violence meted out against black women, whose non-positionality, structural violability and availability to all serves as libidinal and political currency in the conceptual elaboration of “sexual violence.” The explanatory power of the term “femicide,” presumed to have a global application, lies in its analogizing of women’s experience by way of shared biological attributes to articulate their structural vulnerability in relation to males qua bearers of the phallus, within a heteronormative paradigm of sexual desire and object choice. If, as I contend, an antiblack erotics animates the figuration of “woman” as she functions in the disciplinary field of anthropology and in the discourse generalizable as feminism, this article is necessarily an examination of the predicament of attending to sexual violence under conditions of racial capitalist modernity. At stake, more broadly, then, is how these predicaments might also inflect the critical lexicon of feminist discourses.