Don’t call it murder. It’s femicide

Although we are well into the 21^st century, the debate about whether we should be using the term “femicide” rages on. Officials, intellectuals and everyday people still talk about “homicides” and “crimes of passion”, obscuring the fact that women are often killed precisely for being women. We bring together three women novelists to discuss how literature talks about femicide. In Dead Girls by Argentinian writer Selva Almada, three unresolved femicides in rural Argentina in the 1980s become the starting point for an exploration of the casual violence and the targeted crimes faced by women and girls in the country. How has growing up in a sexist culture influenced a feminist writer like Almada? In her novel The Pack, Vicky Tselepidou follows six narrators as they piece together the puzzle of a crime. Among them, the voice of the perpetrator of a femicide in constant dialogue with his victim who, through her absence, becomes ever-present. London-based German writer Katharina Volckmer loves digging deep into sexual identities and their distinct linguistic idioms. In her novels The Appointment and Wonderfuck, she skewers how our reactions to writing about sex and desire differ based on the author’s gender: men’s writing is described as “dynamic” and “realistic”, but women’s as “bold”, “shocking” or “obscene”.