Podcasting and Resistance to Gender-Based Violence across Canada, the United States, and Mexico

Using a comparative border studies approach, this chapter explores how podcasting has been used to examine, expose, and critique longstanding structures and crises of gender-based violence, specifically femicide and feminicide in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. As it focuses on how North American borders figure in podcasts’ discussion of gender-based violence, the chapter explains how the medium is an effective means of shedding light on the trans-border and transnational nature of gender-based violence of femicide and feminicide and argues that podcasting’s essential qualities are fundamental to its potential to expose and challenge cross-border gender-based violence in North America. The chapter analyses two podcasts, Forgotten: Women of Juárez, hosted by journalists Oz Woloshyn and Mónica Ortiz Uribe, which aired in 2020 on the iHeartMedia platform; and journalist Connie Walker’s (Cree) Missing & Murdered: Finding Cleo investigation, which aired in 2018 as a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation podcast. Each of these shows draws attention and responds to femicides in different ways, mobilizing the narrative techniques of investigative journalism alongside more context-specific and locally grounded storytelling strategies to directly engage listeners.