In her recent book Femicide in War and Peace, Israeli anthropologist and femicide expert Shalva Weil says that “the dividing line between femicide in wartime and peacetime is very thin.” Trigger warning: that fact is the subject of this episode. While the term femicide, the murder of a woman because she is a woman, was created in 1973, it did not gain popularity until the 2000s, and Shalva was instrumental in putting the phenomena of femicide into our collective consciousness. In this episode we discuss Shalva’s groundbreaking research and her work pioneering femicide observatories, the many obstacles to keeping track of dead women, and the question of why feminist organizations of the world, including UN Women, refused to condemn Hamas’ rape and murder of approximately 300 women in Israel on October 7, 2023 - as femicide.
