Geographies of Missing Data About Feminicide

Keywords: Feminicide, Data Science, Data Feminism, Latin America, Gender
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 6

Abstract

Feminicide (or femicide) is the gender-related killing of women and girls. It reflects patriarchal and racialized systems of oppression but also reveals how territories and socio-economic landscapes configure everyday gender-based violence (Segato, 2004; Gutiérrez Amaros, 2020; Monárrez Fragoso et al., 2010; Driver, 2015) or how gendered forms of violence that begin in times of “war” extend into and become normalized in times of so-called peace (Fregoso and Bejarano, 2009). It is the ultimate expression of “how wars are fought through and over the body (and particular bodies)” of women (Faria et al., 2020: 1150). In the past decades, many grassroots data collection initiatives have emerged with the aim of monitoring this extreme but often invisible phenomenon. In this article, we place feminist geography scholarship on violence in conversation with data feminism (D’Ignazio and Klein, 2020) to examine the ways in which space, broadly defined, shapes the data activism strategies of these groups, which constitute counterdata collection. Drawing on a qualitative study of 22 monitoring efforts led by civil society activists and organizations across 13 countries, primarily in Latin America, we show that counterdata on feminicide is both place-specific and transcalar. Activists deploy multiple spatialized strategies to illuminate geographies of missing data—spaces that the state or the media often do not reach. They visibilize the locations and context of violence; they build networks of solidarity and knowledge-sharing. In this sense, we argue that counterdata on feminicide constitutes a space of resistance and resignification of everyday forms of gender-based violence.