The Destruction of the Other

Feminicide Violence and Gore Capitalism in Contemporary Mexico

Abstract

This article examines femicidal violence in Mexico from a historical-social and psychosocial perspective, framed with Sayak Valencia’s concept of gore capitalism. Drawing on paradigmatic cases —such as the femicides in Ecatepec, San Quitin, Toluca and the profile of a serial feminicide— it explores how extreme violence is not merely an individual excess, but a practice embedded in a system that turns bodies into commodities, messages, and instruments of power. Revisiting Georges Bataille’s and Michel Foucault’s reflections on Gilles de Rais and Pierre Rivière, the paper problematizes the “institutional mutism” that, rather than ensuring justice, perpetuates impunity and normalizes violence. Femicidal violence is approached as symptom of the erosion of the symbolic and political order meant to safeguard life, rather than as mere pathologies of deviant individuals. In dialogue with Byung-Chul Han, Yago Franco and Sayak Valencia, the article examines the production of ultra-violent subjectivities —Valencia’s “endriago subjects” — arising from economic precarity, frustrated hyperconsumption and the media spectacularization of crime. Finally, it argues that confronting femicidal violence requires an interdirectional approach capable of unveiling the structural, symbolic, and economic networks sustaining it, thus proposing frameworks of action oriented toward justice, collective autonomy, and the reconfiguration of social imaginaries.