Date of Award

Spring 4-7-2023

Document Type

Undergraduate Thesis

Degree Name

B.A. in International Studies

Organizational Unit

Josef Korbel School of International Studies

First Advisor

Kara Kingma Neu

Keywords

Feminicide, Mexico, Media representations, Violence against women, Social media, Facebook, News discourse

Abstract

Feminicides are defined as misogynistic killings of women where men kill women simply for being women. Feminist scholars have focused on bringing to light feminicide’s structural gender-based nature and the state’s complicity in the continuance of this misogynistic violence. They have argued that media representations of feminicide play a role in influencing citizen perspectives on feminicides. However, empirical evidence is missing to support the claim that negative media portrayals of feminicides lead to negative perspectives or that ethical and activistic portrayals lead to activistic perspectives. This study will aim to bridge the gap in this claim. My research question is: how do ethical/activistic and negative representations of feminicide influence Mexican citizens’ perspectives on the issue of feminicides? I measure Mexican citizens’ perspectives by analyzing Facebook media comments under negative and ethical/activistic portrayals from Mexican news sources to uncover how these differences in portrayal language impact perspectives. It is found that the effects of negative and ethical/activistic portrayals differ between “perfect victim” feminicide cases and those that do not fall under this frame. Compared to negative portrayals, comments under ethical/activistic portrayals of “perfect victim” feminicide cases show more sympathy for the victim but did not curb victim blaming or perpetrator justification. Comments under ethical/activistic portrayals of feminicides that did not fall under the “perfect victim” frame contained significantly less victim blaming and minimally decreased perpetrator justification but did not increase sympathy for the victim. Ethical/activistic portrayals of both feminicides had slightly more comments demonstrating a systemic understanding of feminicide.

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. This work may only be accessed by members of the University of Denver community. The work is provided by permission of the author for individual research purposes only and may not be further copied or distributed. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Yatzari Lozano Vazquez

Provenance

Received from author

File Format

application/pdf

Language

en

File Size

58 pgs

Discipline

International studies

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