Feminicide data, emotional labor and self-care
By Helena Suárez Val, Angeles Martinez Cuba, Catherine D’Ignazio with design by Melissa Q. Teng.
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Social silence, neglect, the idea that there are more urgent problems and the shame and anger that do not lead to transforming things but to minimizing the facts and claiming that “the dead women” are not that many — all of these contribute to feminicide. (Lagarde y de los Ríos)
Gender-related violence against women and its lethal outcome, feminicide, are a serious problem throughout the world and have been a longstanding concern of the feminist movement. However, progress in combating this violence remains painfully slow, including progress on producing data to help understand its scale and characteristics. Despite the fact that many governments have criminalized feminicide in their laws and that the UN has called for the establishment of feminicide observatories in every country, official data are often absent, incomplete, difficult to access, infrequently updated and generally disputed.
Producing feminicide data has historically been an important feminist tactic to make gender-related violence visible and to draw attention to the lack of data from official sources. Faced with these “missing data”, data activists, human rights defenders and civil society groups step into the gap by tracking cases of feminicide in the media and cross-referencing information with official and unofficial sources, to generate “counterdata” (D’Ignazio and Klein). These efforts constitute a disobedient appropriation of data production methods and technologies (Suárez Val), putting data in the service of social justice instead of control and surveillance. Our action-research project, Data Against Feminicide, has catalogued over 150 initiatives that record gender-related murders and violent deaths, and we have interviewed 30 group or individual projects working in the Americas (map below).
Tactics for self- and collective care in working with data about feminicide
Some tactics focus on daily maintenance (figure 1) through workflow adjustments. Taking breaks or setting limits on time spent registering cases is one of the measures most mentioned by activists. This allows each person to establish their own rhythm of work: to stop or resume when it is emotionally convenient. Some activists limit the frequency with which they upload data because it affects them emotionally and they cannot do this type of work for a long time during the day because, as the members of the project Ahora que sí nos ven said, “it does your head in”. The possibility of automating some aspects also emerged as an option to reduce emotional labor. Other activists focus on the pleasure of learning new skills by improving on technical aspects of data recording.
Other tactics are more linked to how activists manage their affective relationship (figure 2) to feminicide data. By choosing when to distance themselves from certain aspects of the violence or to avoid working on some fields (e.g., cause of death or type of weapon), activists reduce the emotional burden since they process less information. In contrast, some activists channel the rage produced by reading about violence towards the production of better counterdata and concrete actions. Many activists have also expressed that their commitment to the cause outweighs any secondary emotional trauma they experience, serving as a driving force for the continued production of counterdata.
Finally, other tactics are related to the ethico-political practice of feminism (figure 3). Those who work collectively check up on each other or establish spaces for emotional support where each person can vent the heavy burden that the work entails. Individual activists also use collective means to heal, for example by sharing on social networks or apps. Finally, other groups, such as the Red Feminista Antimilitarista, mentioned how they collectively celebrate the beauty of creating feminist community, to “not only think about death but also build collectively.”
About Data Against Feminicide
This work is part of a South-North feminist participatory research-action project, called Data Against Feminicide. To learn more about this work and participate in the community, visit http://datoscontrafeminicide.net/.
Acknowledgments
We are so grateful to Melissa Q. Teng for the design work featured in this blog post. You can learn more about her work at https://mqqt.co and follow her at @mqqt_. This story was originally published on Backchannels, the blog for the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S).
