Femicide and Necrodata: Ways of Counting the Killing of Women

Different disciplinary and socio-geographical approaches to counting, reporting, and categorizing death can yield divergent and often contradictory values of risk, harm, and mortality. This article examines historical and contemporary ways of recording and narrating the incidence of female homicide in South Africa (one of the countries with the highest femicide rates in the world), from state and police statistics to medical studies and media reports, and explores how each of these uses both common and discrete necrodata to construct specific narratives that reveal the dead body as a site of conflicting assertions of power.