Law, Femicide, and Countercolonial-Feminist Praxis

This book unearths the buried legacies of modern legal thought, exposing femicide’s entanglements with colonialism, Black Atlantic slavery, and their enduring afterlives, while forging countercolonial pathways to justice.

In the wake of Marielle Franco’s assassination – a Black feminist city councilor murdered in Rio de Janeiro in 2018 – and amid the global resurgence of far-right authoritarianism, the entanglements of femicide, White supremacy, misogyny, and colonial juridico-political architectures have come into stark focus. Challenging dominant frameworks for understanding gender-based violence, this book draws on the insights of Black, Indigenous, queer, and feminist thinkers, engaging both written and oral traditions. Through transdisciplinary methodology grounded in deep listening to grassroots activists across the territory now known as Brazil, here acknowledged as theory-makers, it exposes femicide as an enduring colonial racial-patriarchal order and lays bare the limitations of liberal legal frameworks. By questioning the colonial foundations of legal order, the book cultivates and seeds terrains to imagine and enact transformative justice and generative forms of redress – engaging with choreographies of survival that gesture toward a politics of vitality.

This book will appeal to academics, researchers, activists, and students with interests across a range of disciplines, including critical legal studies; critical Black studies; Indigenous and Amerindian studies; gender and feminist studies; critical criminology; legal anthropology; social movements; Brazilian studies; and anticolonial, decolonial, and postcolonial studies.