How Trans-Led Movements Construct Gender Violence as a Social Problem Through Data

• In Event: Sociology of Sex and Gender Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 16. Gender and Sexual Violence

Abstract

The case of Brazil offers a harrowing paradox: despite the country’s active social movements and progressive human rights initiatives, violence against trans people runs rampant. This accounting is not made possible by official statistics. Rather, these counts are made possible by the work of trans people themselves, who have organized to document the murder of their peers. Over the last decade, the lists created by trans-led organizations have evolved into a nationwide system of data collection and their own knowledge production. These organizations understand violence against trans people in Brazil as shaped by the same colonial legacies that render them absent from official statistics. Their reports are published annually to appeal for gender and sexual minorities’ rights. Yet we know very little about how these critical data are gathered, analyzed, and framed. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and archival research analyzing all the reports produced by the primary trans-led organizations documenting murders of trans people, my ongoing research examines how grassroots actors measure and frame violence to influence public policy and the law. Research shows that populations become legible through processes that render them measurable, visible, and manageable. Additionally, scholarship on social movements suggests that data is frequently mobilized strategically. My findings sit at the intersection of these two ideas. In this paper, I focus on one finding that highlights how this process unfolds, which I call the statistical strategy. Organizations measure anti-trans murders, but simultaneously emphasize their underreporting and avoid interpreting year-to-year fluctuations as indicators of change; instead, they focus on the persistence of lethal violence rather than numerical variation. This serves as evidence that statistics on violence are neither neutral nor objective. Rather, I argue, their strategic use of quantitative evidence foregrounds the epistemological limits of measurement and reveals the socially constructed aspect of data on violence.

Author

• Natalia Heringer-Luckemeier, University of North Texas