Here is a good page ofAndré Perrin, “Media Postures”, L'Artilleur, 2022.
On December 6, 1989, a man armed with a rifle and a knife entered a classroom at the École Polytechnique de Montréal where there were about sixty students.
After separating the women from the men and ordering the latter to leave, he addressed the former in the following terms: "You are women, you are going to become engineers. You are nothing but a bunch of feminists. I hate feminists." Thereupon, he opened fire on them. This massacre, which left fourteen victims, not counting the wounded, seems to correspond quite well to the definition that the Petit Robert of the French language gives of the word feminicide:
"Murder of a woman, of a girl because of her sex."
It is therefore surprising to see this word applied to the cases of women – there were ninety in 2020 who were killed by their spouse. Are they killed because of their sex, like the victims of a serial killer motivated by hatred of women as women? Even if we leave aside the cases of women whose husbands kill them to spare them the suffering of an incurable disease, the word femicide does not seem to be very suitable for those, the most frequent, where the murder is perpetrated in the context of a marital dispute. Would it not be more relevant and more rigorous to speak of uxoricide? It has been objected to this proposition that in Roman law, at the time of Augustus, uxoricide designated the right of the husband to kill his wife when she was caught in the act of adultery in the marital home. However, this objection presupposes that the meaning of words is fixed in their original meaning and cannot evolve with time and customs: it should then also apply to that of femicide, the origin of which dates back to Carol Orlock and Diana Russell who gave it, around 45 years ago, the meaning of "murder of women committed by men because they are women".
Why grant femicide what we refuse to uxoricide? In any case, the current use of the word femicide raises a certain number of difficulties. When a man kills his partner because she wants to leave him, does he kill her because she is a woman or because she wants to leave him? And if it is a woman who kills her partner or wife, is it femicide? And if it is a man who kills his partner under the same conditions, is it viricide? And in cases where it is the woman who kills her husband or partner, which represents approximately 20% of marital murders, how can we
Should we name the thing? Is it a simple homicide, which would mean that she eliminates him as a member of the human race and not as an unbearable husband or representative of a male sex supposed to be violent and domineering by nature?
Jean-Claude Michéa points out to me that the murder of the Rambouillet police officer was not presented by the media as a femicide. That is true. Neither in this case, nor in any other similar one, has a policewoman's murder ever been described as a femicide. What should we conclude from this? Thanks to Monique Wittig, we learned a long time ago that "lesbians are not women"! Thanks to our journalists, we now know that female police officers, even heterosexual ones, are not either.
