Helena Suárez Val
Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies
University of Warwick
Feminicide names the gender-related violent deaths of women, the tip of the iceberg in a continuum of violence that is “terrorising women” in the Americas (Fregoso and Bejarano 2010). Latin America and the Caribbean has been named “the most violent [region] in the world for women” (UNDP and UN Women 2017) and feminist activists have been responding to this ongoing crisis by intensifying activism on the issue. As well as mass protests, performances, hashtag campaigns, community organising, and other actions, feminist activists across Latin America have been denouncing feminicide by creating digital cartographies of the violence, including my own project mapping feminicide in Uruguay (feminicidiouruguay.net). In this short paper, I share an investigation where I put into dialogue affect and emotion theories, conceptualisations of feminicide, and scholarship that reclaims quantitative and geographic methods for feminist research and activism, to propose that digital maps of feminicide constitute feminist affect amplifiers: interactive digital artefacts through which data about cases of feminicide –modulated through feminist knowledges, emotions, and affects– are recirculated in/to the world. This practice of creating feminist data visualisations can be understood as part of an affective politics oriented to generating change in personal and political responses to feminicide. A politics hoping to end violence against women.