Mourning and Numbers: The Feminist Politics of Counting Feminicides in Brazil

Data on gender-based violence circulates through both government and civil society to illustrate the urgency of the problem. In the case of lethal violence against women, recent legal reforms in Latin America—specifically through the category of feminicide (feminicídio)—have pushed states to account for the killing of women. But feminists often challenge state data on gender-based lethal violence by producing their own data through feminist collective efforts. In light of this, I ask: How do activists make sense of their collective strategies under the pressure of datafication? Drawing on 40 interviews with feminist activists in Brazil, I illustrate the paradoxical role of numbers in feminist activism against violence. While counting the killings of women is seen by feminists as a way to mourn and honor these women, they also criticize the quantification of violence for erasing the personal stories of victims. Building on feminist affect theory, I argue that the politics of counting feminicides creates an ambivalent affective investment in numbers for activists. This ambivalence places feminist practices of collective mourning within the logic of datafication while they try to honour the stories behind the numbers.