A review by ashlightgrayson
Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall

challenging informative tense medium-paced

3.5

This book serves as a good introduction to intersectional feminism that includes people of color. I feel like it could have used some more nuance when it came to discussing feminism from a more global perspective. The author is American and it is clear that the intended audience seems to be American. However, I feel that there were some misleading statements that needed to be addressed. I read this for a buddy read and I explained in my buddy read comments the main issue I had with this book and have included it below:

 
In the chapter titled Missing and Murdered, the author discusses femicide and violence against women. She also further discusses how the disappearances of indigenous and black women do not nearly get as mainstream media attention as they should. The first thing that came to mind was how much media attention the Gabby Petito case got while there are so many unsolved disappearances for women of color. 

The author also briefly mentions El Salvador and the rates of femicide there. There is a line in this chapter that I read and immediately thought may have been inaccurate, not necessarily in terms of statistics, but in the way it was presented. Page 151, the author states the following:

We know that of documented murders, 22 percent of the nearly fifteen thousand people killed every year in the United States are women, while only 11 percent of the murders in El Salvador are women.

My mother is Central American and I have visited multiple times, so I feel like this is something I can speak on. Violence in general in Latin America is rampant. This statement seemed like an attempt to make it seem like murder rates were the main measure of violence against women and that it was worse in the United States than in El Salvador. I attempted to look up the sources for this statement, but the ones given at the end of the book seem to reference other topics addressed in the chapter rather than this statistic specifically. Therefore, I opted to do some further research. This was the first articles I found pertaining to the countries with the highest femicide rates in the world:

Femicide: a global tragedy, no matter your gender
https://www.worldvision.ca/stories/gender-equality/femicide-a-global-tragedy-no-matter-your-gender

Central America: Femicides and Gender Based Violence:
https://cgrs.uchastings.edu/our-work/central-america-femicides-and-gender-based-violence

The United States was not mentioned and according to the first article above about femicide. In fact:

Seven out of 10 countries with the highest female murder rates are in Latin America, where gang violence plays a major role.

This quote also has a link to another article discussing why Latin America has the highest femicide rates in the world:

Why Does Latin America have the World's Highest Female Murder Rates:
https://insightcrime.org/news/analysis/why-does-latin-america-have-the-world-s-highest-female-murder-rates/

I understand that Latin America gets a bad reputation based on how it is reported on in the United States. However, there is some truth to that.  My mother has a family friend whose daughter was followed home after school and brutally murdered because she refused the advances of a man. Stories like this are incredibly common in Honduras, my mother's home country. I should also add, that despite the fact that it seems the murder rates in El Salvador have decreased under the current government, the disappearances have increased according to the following article:

El Salvador's house of horrors becomes grisly emblem of war on women:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/25/el-salvador-house-of-horror-women-murders

I also believe that the murder rate should not be the main baseline for measuring violence against women in a comparable way. About 2 years ago I recall that Kate del Castillo was participating in a play focused on femicide in Juarez, Mexico. She had an interview on NBC Nightly (linked below), where she discusses in detail how femicide in Mexico is not just about the actual murder, but the violence involved in the murders. She notes that women in Mexico are often not just murdered, but raped, quite literally torn to pieces, and sometimes have their murderers wear their nipples as necklaces around their necks. Click below for the full interview:

Interview with Kate del Castillo on NBC Nightly News:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWOtffgxdKc&t=1s

It is also very common for women to be murdered indirectly. Drug cartels often use women as drug mules. To further explain, drug mules are people who smuggle contraband (often drugs) across borders. For women this can often mean having bags of cocaine placed in their breast or buttocks implants, sometimes without them knowing. In other instances, pregnant women swallow bags of drugs, sometimes having the bags disintegrate while inside them causing an overdose and immediate death. Some of these women enter into these arrangements willingly as a result of economic hardship and a lack of better options. I am unsure if the statistic mentioned by the author in this chapter of Hood Feminism included the indirect murder of women in this way. Even if it was not, I feel that the methods of murder in the United States versus other countries would have been useful as a point of comparison. I don't believe that the methods mentioned in this paragraph are necessarily something I hear about often in the United States.

As a further example of femicide in Latin America, there was a case of a woman whose head was found in a phone booth in Guatemala, placed there by a cartel as a warning to the government to stop their attempts at impeding their criminal activities. The articles referencing these incidents are linked below:

The Rise of Femicide and Women in Drug Trafficking:
https://www.coha.org/the-rise-of-femicide-and-women-in-drug-trafficking/

Woman decapitated as Guatemalan gangs hit back after extortion crackdown:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/woman-decapitated-as-guatemalan-gangs-hit-back-after-extortion-crackdown-2282118.html

This articles also references the same decapitation:

https://www.kaieteurnewsonline.com/2011/10/30/the-rise-of-femicide-and-women-in-drug-trafficking/#:~:text=In%20May%202011%2C%20a%2020-year-old%20woman%E2%80%99s%20decapitated%20head,often%20hold%20the%20family%20together%20in%20these%20societies.

I think this chapter could have used a bit more of a nuanced discussion about the way it is much more common to see this level of brutality in murders against women in other countries compared to the United States. I understand that violence and femicide against women is an issue in the United States too, but the way it was framed in this chapter felt like it was minimizing the plight of women in other countries to me. For further context, if you were shocked by the abortion law passed in Texas last year, then you'll be thrilled to know that that abortion laws of this magnitude are the norm in Honduras. Since 1997 women in Honduras could go to prison from 3-6 years for having an abortion as well as the medical staff involved. Last year, this line of lawmaking was even further solidified. This article from CNN gives a lot more details on the topic:

How lawmakers made it nearly impossible to legalize abortion in Honduras:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/31/americas/honduras-abortion-ban-ratified-intl/index.html

Femicide is a global issue and no matter how low the rate in any country it is an issue that needs to be addressed because it should never happen at all. I should clarify that this commentary is not motivated by a need to defend femicide in the United States. I just think that the way the author frames murder rates in El Salvador compared to the United States ignores the more increased violence present in a lot of Central American countries. Again, I can mostly speak to Latin America and not other countries since that is where my experience and background is. This is not an attempt to dismiss the suffering of women in the United States. However, I do wish to offer a more international perspective on this topic and I felt it was necessary to address it here. If you find anything that is a rebuttal to anything I have said, please feel free to share it. I have picked up this book in an attempt to learn more about feminism in relation to women of color. I am open to being corrected on any information I present because I want to become more informed, and growing and learning is part of that.

To add to this topic, there is a video I watched months ago from a Mexican expat that spoke on pretty privilege. She touches upon the difficulties that are faced by women there compared to the United States. I don't necessarily endorse everything she says in the video, but I think that it does give perspective, especially in the first few minutes, about things that American women in general don't really have to think about that women in Latin America often do. Whenever I have visited Honduras, I have to go out of my way to go unnoticed for safety reasons in a way that I've never really had to in the United States. I think I've been longwinded enough, so I'll stop the discussion there. Let me know what you think or if you have something to add to my perspective. Questions are also welcome in case I missed something or need to clarify any of my points. The link to the video is below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVniDFNhDIc 

I feel that this isn't something that most people reading it will notice unless they have personal experience with violence against women in Latin America. It's what mainly brought my rating down from a potential 4 start read to a 3.5 star. This is still a book I would recommend with the above caveat.
Expand filter menu Content Warnings