International Women's Day Lecture: The Covid-19 Pandemic and Violence against Women

LLILAS Benson is proud to co-sponsor an upcoming lecture in the week of March 8.

 
Mexican feminist scholar and anthropologist Dr. Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos will present a public International Women’s Day lecture on the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on violence against women. The lecture will be moderated by Professor Gloria González-López (Sociology / Women’s and Gender Studies) and co-hosted by Nathalia Hernández-Ochoa(LLILAS PhD candidate) and Vivian Rodriguez-Rocha (Geography PhD candidate, Penn State).

Lecture to be streamed online via Facebook.com/UTLLILAS/

For English interpretation of this event, log on to bit.ly/LagardeMarch8

As one of the most influential feminist voices in Latin America and the Spanish-speaking world, Dr. Lagarde has worked for decades to promote women’s rights, especially with regard to violence. She popularized the Spanish-language term feminicidio (“feminicide”), which she originally applied to the wave of murders of women and girls in Ciudad Juárez in the 1990s. Feminicidio, said Lagarde, denotes the connection between murder and gender with an added dimension: state complicity in the acceptance of this crime by virtue of governmental and judicial inaction toward the perpetrators.

Lagarde has been sought as an expert by the United Nations and the Organization of American States, and her tireless work as president of Mexico’s Special Commission on Feminicide led to changes in Mexico’s penal code in 2007 to include the crime of feminicide through the Ley General de Acceso de las Mujeres a una Vida Libre de Violencia (General Law on Women’s Access to a Life Free from Violence).

She has served as a professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and is author of more than 100 publications, including books and articles on gender, feminism, democracy, and violence against women. Her book Los cautiverios de las mujeres: madresposas, monjas, putas, presas y locas (2016), based on her doctoral dissertation, is one of the most influential publications in feminist studies in the Spanish-speaking world. In the words of Professor Gloria González-López, “Dr. Lagarde has done the impossible: she has not only succeeded in academia but has also navigated, shaken up, and survived the patriarchal labyrinth of Mexican politics, always working hard on legal initiatives to advance the human rights of women in Mexico.”In 2016, the University of Texas at Austin joined a network of universities and one research center to establish the Cátedra Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos, a program for the study of gender violence (see this article on the launch of the program).

Free and open to the public. To RSVP and receive updates via Facebook, visit Marcela Lagarde International Women's Day Lecture. For more information, contact Paloma Díaz.