Memory and Erasure in the US Highway Femicides

Using an unsolved murder of a young white woman in the United States in 1992 as a situated point of entry, French considers interventions of feminist, human rights, and Indigenous scholars in the global South to discuss current research about the systematic murder of women as a gendered form of violence in the United States. French argues that so-called “highway homicides'' demonstrate clear characteristics of femincide as a gendered crime of violence, the persistent inadequacies of state agencies to solve them, and the erasure of such gendered crimes from the politics of counting. It considers some of the ways that memories of lethal gendered violence against women produce a culture of fear in which women are rendered chronically at risk in the foreseeable future.

Brigittine French is a feminist linguistic anthropologist whose work focuses on violence, testimony, collective identities, and conflict. She is currently Assistant Vice President of Global Education and Professor of Anthropology at Grinnell College.