(Dis)engaging the State: Amphibious Data Practices on Femicidal Violence in Chile, Guatemala, and Puerto Rico

• In Event: Science, Knowledge & Technology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 8: Shifting Technologies of State Knowledge and Power

Abstract

In recent years in Latin American and the Caribbean, women are being murdered—what has been called “femicides” or “feminicides”—at alarming rates. Amid this violence, state institutions in the region have established data infrastructures to collect and uniformize data on femicides/feminicides. Many feminist activists had established their own data registries as a strategy to contest the absences and distortions of state datafication. But feminist relationships with the state are often ambivalent, therefore, collecting data on femicides/feminicides is a conflicted and contradictory project. Drawing from in- depth interviews and participant observation with activists of the Grupo Guatemalteco de Mujeres, the Observatorio de Equidad de Género de Puerto Rico, and the Red Chilena contra la Violencia hacia las Mujeres, I argue that feminist data practices are both defiant of and compliant with the state: it refuses the state but asks it to do something, while also seeking to move beyond the state. To theorize these data practices, I employ the term “amphibious,” borrowed from Rita Segato’s decolonial conceptualization of the value of undertaking polyvocal and adaptable strategies that work with, against, and beyond the state in the path towards liberation. Fieldwork included extensive textual analysis of organizational websites, reports, blogs, and social media, as well as of national media.

Author

• Firuzeh Shokooh-Valle, University of Puerto Rico