Abstract

MARCO, Martín Di; FERNANDEZ, Martina  and  TALARICO, Elizabeth. Threats, control, and context: how are women accounted for by men who committed intimate femicide in Buenos Aires, Argentina?. Rev. colomb. soc. [online]. 2022, vol.45, n.2, pp.69-89.  Epub Jan 11, 2024. ISSN 0120-159X.  https://doi.org/10.15446/rcs.v45n2/94722.

The structural nature of violence against women, and particularly femicide, in Latin America has been demonstrated by the gender studies, social studies of violence and various schools of criminology, amongst other fields of knowledge. Nonetheless, the perspectives and worldviews of those who perform violence have been comparatively less explored topics, even less when they have committed femicide. In the context of a broader biographical and hermeneutic study applying a socio-narrative approach, this paper inquires about the ways in which women are seen and accounted for by femicide perpetrators in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We conducted 19 narrative interviews to men convicted for femicide in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires and we carried out an intertestimonial analysis following an inductive coding process. Narratives about women were largely organized around three main topics: threat, control, and context. The recurrence of these themes, their structuring function in the stories, and their scope indicate the relevance of these topics in understanding the violence legitimization and neutralization processes. In the narratives, the references to a collective threat against the interviewees' self and the discursive use of the socio-political contexts are notable aspects to analyse the interphase between masculinity, violence, and social change. We remark that societal change revolving around the status of women is employed by men as an explicative and legitimating factor of violence, being this is a largely unexplored topic. We discuss the importance of inquiring about the perpetrators' perspective and of analysing the interaction between narratives and prevalent discourses in society.

Keywords : Argentina; femicide; hegemonic masculinity; narratives; perpetrators.

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