El feminicidio como ritualidad necropolítica: un estudio situado en el norte de Chile

This article examines feminicide as a necropolitical ritual embedded in patriarco-colonial dynamics within the broader crisis of neoliberal capitalism, focusing specifically on Chile’s Norte Grande region. Drawing on a longitudinal study conducted between 2019 and 2024, it employs a mixed-methods approach that combines quantitative analysis of feminicide cases with a theoretical review grounded in decolonial feminisms and critical theory. The findings reveal ritualized patterns of aggression—such as the repeated use of knives, direct physical violence, and the centrality of sexo-affective ties between victims and perpetrators—that reproduce and reinforce patriarchal symbolic meanings. The analysis brings gender, class, race, and territoriality into dialog, showing how feminized bodies are rendered disposable within structural necropolitical power relations. The study also considers the limits of state responses to these forms of violence, despite recent legal reforms. The article argues that feminicide functions as a systematic and symbolic act that reinforces patriarchal, capitalist, and colonial modes of oppression and exploitation. This underscores the need for integral, intersectional, and territorially grounded public policies capable of addressing these issues through a lens that is both structural and context specific. Its originality lies in the interdisciplinary framework and theoretical articulation it advances, which brings together feminicidal rituality and necropolitics through a situated territorial analysis of the Norte Grande. Unlike traditional approaches that examine feminicide solely through legal or social lenses, this study offers an intersectional, decolonial, and situated reading of interwoven forms of violence to illuminate how structural violences of patriarco-colonial capitalism are reproduced in one of their ritual expressions: feminicide. It contributes empirically to a largely underexplored field in the Chilean context by linking the material patterns of the crime with its symbolic and structural dimensions.