Understanding that legal categories are created and shaped through a process that is not only juridical, but also social and political, this paper offers an overview of the category ‘violence against women’ in the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. By doing a critical in-depth analysis of the most relevant cases for the category’s development, besides relying on information gathered through interviews conducted with the Courts’ lawyers, the paper suggests that the category is a translocal one, in the sense that its content has been determined through a complex interaction between transnational formulations and local variables.