Abstract

Cohen's work reminds us of the steady need for a critical engagement in questioning positivistic approaches to deviance, which also applies to femicide and to the definition of its victims. By exploring its construction as a social problem we can understand how more structural understandings of gender-based oppression get silenced, as the authors have shown. Their analysis might then be taken a step further in explaining why waves of moral panic emerge. Given that moral panic works at setting boundaries in ambiguous situations, which boundaries are at stake in the wave they have analysed, and in the more recent one they hint at? The commentary calls for greater attention to class in these processes.