"Counting the invisible": colonial imaginaries and the gender data gap initiative

This project argues that a colonial gaze guides the initiative to “close the Gender Data Gap” (GDG), currently promoted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which promises to render third world women and girls “visible” through innovative mass data collection efforts. Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial thought and feminisms, I analyze how the GDG initiative, in spite of its modernist rhetoric of newness, continues a colonial history of counting, classifying, and governing Others. I turn to the Spanish colonial census of New Granada and 18th century casta paintings to highlight how racial and gender hierarchies inform modern/colonial projects of counting populations. I then closely examine the discourse of the GDG, focusing on the deeply racialized mechanisms of visibility it perpetuates. I conclude with a consideration of the possibilities that may emerge by disobeying the colonial quantifying gaze, and thus making room for alternatives visions of social justice, based on relationality, mutual respect, and solidarity.