Epistemological notes on the politics of numbers on violence against women

Abstract

In this paper we aim to address the politics of numbers displayed by women's movements in Argentina in the last decade about violence against women. In a context of expansion of feminisms across the country and a growing institutionalization of the gender perspective, the rhetoric of numbers has become the lingua franca for the visibility of situations of violence against women. The questions we ask ourselves are: How is the knowledge about gender violence organized today? How do the figures operate in the construction of this knowledge and in its dissemination and social impact? Taking as a corpus the register of femicides of Casa del Encuentro, we are interested, on the one hand, in interrogate the epistemological assumptions and the methodological choices behind it and, on the other, to address the social processes of construction and validation of figures around femicides in a context of politics of numbers. Our argument is, on the one hand, that the register displays an inductive positivist method that acts fictions of scientific objectivity based on the use of figures as indisputable evidence of «facts». On the other hand, we argue that knowledge about femicides is legitimized as expert based on the politics of numbers.