Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action

by Catherine D'Ignazio

Why grassroots data activists in Latin America count feminicide—and how this vital social justice work challenges mainstream data science.

What isn't counted doesn't count. And mainstream institutions systematically fail to account for feminicide, the gender-related killing of women and girls, including cisgender and transgender women. Against this failure, Counting Feminicide brings to the fore the work of data activists across the Americas who are documenting such murders—and challenging the reigning logic of data science by centering care, memory, and justice in their work. Drawing on Data Against Feminicide, a large-scale collaborative research project, Catherine D'Ignazio describes the creative, intellectual, and emotional labor of feminicide data activists who are at the forefront of a data ethics that rigorously and consistently takes power and people into account.

Individuals, researchers, and journalists—these data activists scour news sources to assemble spreadsheets and databases of women killed by gender-related violence, then circulate those data in a variety of creative and political forms. Their work reveals the potential of restorative/transformative data science —the use of systematic information to, first, heal communities from the violence and trauma produced by structural inequality, and second, to envision and work towards the world in which such violence has been eliminated. Specifically, D'Ignazio explores the possibilities and limitations of counting and quantification—reducing complex social phenomena to convenient, sortable, aggregable forms—when the goal is nothing short of the elimination of gender-related violence.

Counting Feminicide showcases the incredible power of data feminism in practice, in which each murdered woman or girl counts, and, in being counted, joins a collective demand for the restoration of rights and a transformation of the gendered order of the world.

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism

392 pages, Hardcover

Published April 30, 2024

About the author

Catherine D'Ignazio is Assistant Professor of Urban Science and Planning at MIT and coauthor of Data Feminism (MIT Press).

Reviews

[Florencia]

Pensé que iba a ser una discusión más teórico de qué constituye un femicidio pero no fue muy decepcionante.
“Thus, the labor of feminicide counterdata research is feminized, racialized, devalued and undercompensated. This is consistent with the feminist concept of reproductive labor - the care work that sustains, maintains, and reproduces society”.

[Julianna Neuhouser · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is very disappointing as it launders the reputation of the racist transphobe Marcela Lagarde as some sort of intersectional figure. If D'Ignazio had read any of Lagarde's books, she'd know that they're full of rants about the Islamic Menace and so on, never mind her current activism against the rights of trans people or on behalf of the conservative National Action Party, but here Lagarde is portrayed as if she's bell hooks

When asked about this on social media, D'Ignazio simply said that she wasn't aware of this until the book was on its way to the printers - which indicates that her research was bad! Because anyone who knows what they're talking about already knows this stuff

And if she was this wrong about something I do know about, maybe she's also wrong about other things I don't know about in other parts of the book