Gender Data, Intersectionality, and a Feminist Politics of “Negotiated Refusal”

Gender and intersectional data are recognized as vital to addressing gender-based violence. We engage this thesis through a case study of a gender data project at the Colombia-Venezuela border. Coming from an underexplored vantage point in the literature, we trouble the assumption that more data are always better for advancing feminist objectives around GBV. We advance the concept of "negotiated refusal" to make sense of the decision of the project's frontline implementers to collect less data. We argue that the complex character of inequalities and the dynamic nature of context requires flexibility in what gender and intersectional data should consist of and that top-down frameworks may ultimately prove counter-productive to gender equality efforts.