Feminicide: Unravelling the State’s Data Infrastructures

Abstract

In this paper, I unravel the socio-materiality of the Mexican State’s data infrastructures measuring feminicide. Based on 14 semi-structured in-depth interviews with experts and dozens of content analyses of secondary sources, I argue that feminicide data are better understood as iteratively multiple rather than singularly factual. That is, the seeming singularity of a woman’s dead body shifts into many as her case is classified differently along the choreographed interactions between people, tools, protocols and techniques enacting feminicide as data. I propose the concept of ‘permeability device’ to showcase how power unevenly accrues through the different methods and mediums by which information is documented and transferred across data infrastructures. By opening feminicide data in their everyday multiplicity, I demonstrate how the unequal distribution of power becomes evident in the lack of gender perspective in crime investigations aggravated by public patriarchy, the challenges of processing information incited by the scarcity of resources resulting in data debris and the affective resonance experienced by public servants exposed to gruesome content. In the discussion, I point to precarity as a condition that cuts through the State’s infrastructures enacting feminicide as data.