Erasing gendered death: Bureaucracies of (Un)Knowing in criminology

Abstract

The empirical authority of state-centered criminological knowledge often depends on the bureaucracies that decide which deaths are countable. This article conceptualizes bureaucracies of (Un)Knowing: institutional systems that organize ignorance while appearing to produce knowledge. Focusing on the omission of “femicide” from U.S. law and data, it examines how classification, measurement, and silence operate as technologies of governance. Through the U.S. case, it identifies three mechanisms—refusal, incorporation, and displacement—through which bureaucratic ignorance is institutionalized. The analysis builds from feminist, critical, decolonial, Southern, zemiological, and post-structural traditions that have long challenged the state's authority to define crime and harm, while showing how dominant administrative evidence can still reproduce state-produced erasures. Advancing a criminology of (Un)Knowing, the article treats absence not as deficit but as evidence of power. It argues that confronting these epistemic infrastructures is essential to reimagining what and who counts within criminological knowledge.