This article examines the contested process of law‐making related to the killing of women which resulted in the criminalization of feminicide (feminicidio) and femicide (femicidio) in Mexico and Nicaragua, two countries in which feminists engaged in legal activism to increase state accountability for gendered violence. Through comparative analysis, we demonstrate the importance of (1) the interaction between shifting local political conditions and supranational opportunities and (2) the position of feminist actors vis‐à‐vis the state and its gender regime in shaping regional variation in the making of laws concerning gendered violence. In Mexico, the criminalization of feminicidio resulted from a successful naming and shaming campaign by local feminist actors linked to litigation in various supranational arenas, and the intervention of feminist federal legislators. In Nicaragua, the codification of femicidio resulted from the state's selective responsiveness to feminist demands in a moment of narrow political opportunity within an otherwise highly consolidated regime. We also examine the unmaking of these laws through their perversion in practice (Mexico) and their intentional undermining (Nicaragua) at the hands of the state. Our analysis demonstrates how states' decisions to enact legislation against gendered violence does not occur solely because they are invested in international legitimacy, but also in response to states' shifting acceptance of the legitimacy of supranational authority itself.

This article analyses the transformation of femicide from an academic concept into a frame for political struggle, and into a crime in the context of Mexican feminist activism against the murders of women, or feminicidios, in Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua City. Through analysis of interviews with Mexican activists, the author argues that the implications of the transformations of feminicidio for social change are tied to the interplay between the transnational and the local impacts of feminist human rights advocacy. Drawing on Myra Marx Ferree's work on the 'resonance' and 'radicalism' of feminist frames, the article's findings challenge the straightforward association of radical social change to transnational advocacy and its attendant framing of social problems in terms of international human rights norms. Contrary to existing scholarship on transnational human rights advocacy, the article shows that feminicidio constitutes a resonant frame transnationally, but operates as a radical frame domestically. The dissonance between the transnational and national framing of feminicidio has complicated the ways in which Mexican feminists can engage with the state after the institutionalization of feminicidio as a crime to produce radical social change for women's everyday experiences of violence and their access to justice.

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