Feminicide is the murder of cisgender and transgender women and girls for gender-related reasons. It reflects systems of patriarchal and racialized oppression and reveals how territories and socioeconomic landscapes shape everyday gender-based violence. In recent decades, many community data production initiatives have emerged with the goal of monitoring this extreme yet often invisible phenomenon. We connect studies on feminist and computational geographies with data feminism to analyze the ways in which space, in a broad sense, shapes the counter-data production strategies of activists monitoring feminicides.
Based on a qualitative study of 33 monitoring efforts led by civil society organizations in 15 countries, primarily in Latin America, we provide a conceptual framework to examine the spatial dimensions of data activism. We show how striking transnational patterns exist related to the places where feminicide is not recorded, resulting in geographies of missing data. In response to these omissions, activists deploy multiple spatialized strategies to make these geographies visible, situate and contextualize each case of feminicide, reclaim databases as spaces of memory and testimony, and build transnational networks of solidarity. In this regard, we argue that data activism on feminicide constitutes a space of resistance and re-signification of the everyday forms of gender-based violence.
D’Ignazio, C., Cruxên, I., Martinez Cuba, A., Suárez Val, H., Dogan, A., & Ansari, N. (2024). Geographies of missing data: Spatializing counterdata production against feminicide. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 02637758241275961.