Gender and Political Apology

When the Patriarchal State Says “Sorry”

Emma Dolan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367610258
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000431223
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a much-needed gendered reading to the increasingly important practice of political apology.

Engaging in depth with two cases of interstate apologies for conflict-related sexual violence – Japan's apologies for the South Korean "comfort women" and US apologies for the Abu Ghraib scandal – the author argues that political apologies are particularly "excitable" or uncontrollable forms of speech which are composed of and rearticulate historically constituted gender norms. In doing so, political apologies work to recognise and make visible particular gendered victims whilst simultaneously obscuring others. Through the concept of "legitimate victimhood", the author examines the performative ways in which political apologies (re)negotiate and (re)make embodied gendered identities. Ultimately, she argues that the ambivalent form of recognition offered by the performance of official apologies in these cases resulted in numerous unintended consequences, including opportunities for victims to demonstrate linguistic agencies. Political apologies for conflict-related sexual violence can therefore — indirectly — empower the gendered victims addressed.

This book will be of great interest to students, academics, and researchers in the fields of politics and international relations, women's and gender studies, memory studies, victimology, transitional justice, human rights, and peace and conflict studies. It will also interest policymakers, practitioners, and campaign groups involved in such areas as justice for gender-based violence.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003102946-1

It is not enough to inquire how women might become more fully represented in language and politics. Feminist critique ought also to understand how the category of “woman”, the subject of feminism, is produced and restrained by the very structures through which emancipation is sought. (Butler, 1990: 5)

Political actors have, since the 1990s, increasingly engaged in performances of public apology, leading some to label this the “age of apology” (Brooks, 1999; Olick, 2007; Nobles, 2008; Bentley, 2016; Thompson, 2012; Dudden, 2014; Gibney and Steiner 2008). Political apologies tend to be viewed in one of two ways by scholars and commentators alike. On the one hand, some argue that political apology represents a means by which marginalised communities or experiences of violence can be incorporated into national histories (e.g., Nobles, 2008; MacLachlan, 2013a) or even that apologies have the capacity to restore agency or moral worth to victims of political violence (Cunningham, 1999; Smith, 2008, 2014; Govier and Verwoerd, 2002). As such, the political apology for various forms of injustice is often considered as a practice embedded within liberal values and results from the global increase of importance of human rights and democracy for state legitimacy (Bentley, 2015; De Greiff, 2008; Murphy, 2011). Others characterise the political apology as essentially a geopolitical manoeuvre utilised by governments in order to facilitate interstate relations, save face or achieve various other diplomatic or strategic objectives (Kampf, 2009; Gries and Peng, 2002).

This book takes as its point of departure the limits of understanding political apologies as gestures of inclusivity or geopolitical manoeuvres to instead offer a performative approach which conceives of political apology as a deeply gendered and gendering practice. By positioning this ostensibly liberal ritual as a form of “excitable speech” (Butler, 1997a) which is always already gendered, I aim to demonstrate in novel ways its complexity and ambivalence. The apologies for conflict-related sexual violence examined in this book attempt to navigate various interests and have effects which are multiple and ultimately out of the control of the speaker. In parallel, by situating political apologies for conflict-related sexual violence within the gendered and affective politics of recognition and grieving (Butler, 2004, 2009; Ahall, 2018; Zehfuss, 2009 etc.), I suggest that this speech act may have the potential to disrupt the gendered and militarist logics which allow for war/violence to occur or to be maintained, but that ultimately the case studies examined in this book work on several levels to (re)empower these logics. This book therefore concerns itself with the paradoxical character of political apology and suggests that even in the process of disavowing gendered forms of violence, political apologies can and do re-assert the hierarchical gendered structures which preserve them. However, because political apologies are never in the full control of the speaker, I show that they can have empowering effects for those who are addressed.

This book therefore represents a response to two overlapping academic lacunae. It first addresses the surprising lack of attention given to gender within the expanding interdisciplinary literature on the topic of political apologies. Though some scholars have begun to make the case for interpreting the gendered dynamics of political or public apologies (most prominently MacLachlan, 2013a, 2019; Park, 2000), there is yet to be a systematic analysis of this practice from a Feminist perspective which explicitly fleshes out the gendered and gendering nature of this speech act. Previous literature on the topic has, however, tended to characterise political apology as a means by which multiple, diverse, and marginalised experiences of violence can be incorporated within the dominant conception of the political community or within officialised histories. In providing an explicitly gendered reading, this book contributes by demonstrating that recognition or inclusion of “the Other” is always a complex process (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013; Butler and Spivak, 2011; Markell, 2009), but is especially so in the context of political apology. Taking this gendered approach allows this book to challenge the assumptions of the preceding literature, which has tended to evaluate political apologies as either successful or unsuccessful in achieving normative goals such as inclusion. In this way, my gendered and performative approach to political apology allows this book to engage with the complexity of this speech act by demonstrating that power and agency exist within discourse, and concurrently that speech can never be in the full control of the speaker.

Second and more broadly, this book grows out of Feminist literature within International Relations which has focused first on the occurrence of the specifically gendered and sexual forms of violence which accompany warfare and the impacts of these, but additionally on the gendered and affective logics of militarisation which permeate the everyday and which operate to sustain military violence (e.g., Ahall and Gregory, 2015; Ahall, 2018; Enloe, 2000). As Kirby (2013: 803) suggests, “wartime sexual violence is a practice, but so is accounting for wartime sexual violence”. In line with this, the current project positions political apology for conflict-related sexual violence as an important practice which not only negotiates public understandings of war, but additionally has the potential capacity to reaffirm or disrupt the gendered logics of grieving and militarisation which make war and sexual violence possible. Further, political apologies are significant for the gender-sensitive scholar precisely because they draw attention in unique ways to the “differential distribution of recognizability” (Butler in Willig, 2012: 140) which permeates all of social and political life, and which has the ultimate impact of sustaining hierarchical gendered structures. Specifically, I suggest throughout this book that apologies for conflict-related sexual violence make particular (gendered) victims visible but, in doing so, also obscure others.

In providing a gender performative framework, I engage in depth with two empirical case studies of apologies for conflict-related sexual violence. The first is made up of numerous Japanese state apologies to South Korea for the “comfort women” who were forced into prostitution,¹ for Japanese imperial forces prior to and during the Second World War. The second case involves U.S.A. apologies delivered for the sexualised forms of torture which occurred at Abu Ghraib military prison in Iraq, photographs of which were then leaked to the media (Hersh, 2004). Each of these empirical cases of conflict-related sexual violence has been subject to rich Feminist scholarly attention (e.g., Soh, 2008; Richter-Montpetit, 2007); however, the significance of the political apologies which followed this violence has often been overlooked within this literature. In the context of increasing international focus upon the intertwined agendas of gender equality and gendered justice, this project does not aim to criticise the failings of these statements of apology or to make suggestions with regard to how they could have been improved, but instead attempts to demonstrate the ways in which political apologies in particular elucidate the continual controversy caused by this agenda within two liberal democracies. Political apologies therefore speak to the ways in which liberal states simultaneously disavow conflict-related sexual violence and reaffirm the gendered, affective discourses which sustain it.

Ultimately, through the interrogation of official statements of apology within two very different political and social contexts, this book demonstrates the complex ways in which hierarchical structures of gender are (re)made through the utterance of political apology. The “comfort women” case is demonstrative of how, after decades of campaigning on the part of both victim groups and the broader Feminist movement within South Korea, the issuing of political apologies by Japan can be read as the success of these campaigns in politicising violence against women at the state level, or alternatively as a method by which state actors can re-assert masculine narrative authority over women. Similarly, the US apologies for the Abu Ghraib scandal might be perceived as expressions which communicate the illegitimacy of sexual abuse and torture within military activities or yet another method of justifying the politics of violence surrounding the Global War on Terror. Rather, the apologies are so fascinating precisely because they do all of this and demonstrate in novel ways the precariousness and vulnerability of the construct of gender which, as Butler reminds us, must be “ritualistically repeated, whereby the repetition occasions both the risk of failure and the congealed effect of sedimentation” (1997a: 49). I aim to show throughout this project that political apologies are especially precarious repetitions of gender because they address particularly controversial issues and because, by performative convention, they imply a response.

The argument

This book makes the central argument that political apologies are forms of “excitable speech” (Butler, 1997a) which are always already gendered, and which operate to recognise particular (gendered) victims. Though all speech might be considered “excitable” (Butler, 1997a), to argue that political apology is particularly precarious is to suggest that apologies derive their capacity for meaning-making and their intelligibility in part from repeating gendered logics which, in turn, make up structures of power and institutions which govern social and political life. Using this post-structuralist conception of the speech act will result in a destabilisation of the assumption of intentionality which has permeated previous work on this topic. In arguing that political apology is an “excitable” speech act (Butler, 1997a), I suggest that although apologies have the potential to both reiterate and disrupt gendered discourses, the case studies of apologies examined in this book demonstrate that this speech act is likely to (re)empower gender relations in hierarchical and conventional ways.

Resulting from the reading of political apology as a form of “excitable speech” (Butler, 1997a) is the performative capacity this speech act possesses to recognise embodied gender identities. This challenges previous approaches, which contend that “successful” apologies for human rights violations create more inclusive societies (e.g., MacLachlan, 2013a; Murphy, 2011; Nobles, 2008), by demonstrating that this process is always differential. Whilst this form of recognition certainly legitimises and therefore makes visible certain accounts of violence, this is a process which necessitates that some “others” are always left unrecognised. I demonstrate throughout this book the various gendered dynamics which are involved in this process of performative recognition and the ways in which apology somewhat uniquely communicates (un)acceptable forms of violence (Butler, 2004, 2009), a process which is also shown to empower (performative, masculine-coded) state sovereignty (Markell, 2003).

Through the performative capacity political apologies possess to recognise the “other”, I suggest that there is the potential that this recognition can disrupt the gendered logics which make military violence possible (Butler, 2004, 2009). However, the cases examined in this book subvert this potential in several ways. Not only do the apologies decontextualise the forms of violence they address, but they mediate a spectacular politics of victimhood which obscures endemic and everyday forms of gender and military violence. Through performative and affective practices, the apologies subvert critical, structural, and everyday explanations of gendered injustice in favour of a spectacle of violence which may have voyeuristic implications for the (gendered) victims themselves.

The inherently “excitable” (Butler, 1997a) nature of political apologies suggests that, despite their capacity to reclaim narrative authority over “truth” and to re-empower hierarchical gendered power structures, apologies themselves are particularly vulnerable to various forms of potentially subversive re-citation by multiple actors. Thus, this book argues that apologies do not necessarily make victims into political agents through “moral interlocution” (Smith, 2008, 2014) or through inclusion of narratives of injustice or disadvantage (Nobles, 2008; MacLachlan, 2013a), but that linguistic and embodied agencies (Butler, 1997a) can result from the speech act of apology through a process in which victim groups reject, challenge, or redeploy the discourse offered in the statement. In addition, apologies are precarious speech acts which result in myriad political and social consequences, many of which are not intended by the speaker. Therefore, although political apologies may attempt to carry out specific political objectives, the particularly “excitable” (Butler, 1997a) and therefore vulnerable nature of this speech act will always result in a proliferation of consequences which are ambivalent for the apologising actor as well as for the victims addressed. Political apologies can therefore result in novel agencies for victim groups, though not in the ways which have been suggested by previous approaches.

Case study selection and methodology

Before detailing the case study selection and methods used in this book, a brief note on my epistemological standpoint. This book takes an anti-foundationalist, Feminist approach to doing International Relations research. As such, it shares the suspicion often articulated by Feminist scholars of approaches “committed to causality, hypothesis testing and replicability” (Tickner, 2006: 19). This is a pertinent point, especially when carrying out analysis of political apologies, which are often considered in line with various practices of “truth-telling” (see, for example, Murphy, 2011; Verdeja, 2010). This book does not make claims about the factual validity of statements of apology and rather takes the epistemological perspective that politics is made up of countless layers of interpretation. This project is primarily interested in the process by which gendered ways of being become common sense through the prism of political apology. For this reason, I make use of a method of analysis which supports my Feminist epistemology. This section first outlines the methods which allowed for my selection of the two empirical case studies examined in these pages. Second, I explain the key reasons for which Foucauldian Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is employed in this book. Finally, because this project analyses not only the spoken text of the apologies it addresses, but dramaturgical and embodied dynamics which are significant to their gendered meaning-making, I then delineate the utility of CDA as a method of engaging with multimodal and affective forms of discourse.

I chose the case studies examined in this book as key examples of apologies for conflict-related sexual violence, the first being the Japanese state apologies to South Korea for the “comfort” system, which was instated prior to the Second World War, and the second being the U.S.A. apologies for the torture scandal which occurred at Abu Ghraib military prison in Iraq in the context of the Global War on Terror. These cases are both positive examples of apologies for conflict-related sexual violence, as both demonstrate instances in which a state actor has provided verbal redress for victims (or the “victim” state). The case studies demonstrate both similarities and differences, and therefore have the potential to provide rich empirical insights into the gendered dimensions of political apology as practice. Both cases feature multiple apologies delivered by various Japanese and US governmental officials which tend to follow similar narrative frameworks. In addition, both sets of apologies address harms which occurred within the context of conflict, though it should be noted that the Japanese apologies to South Korea occurred decades after the end of the war and the US apologies for the Abu Ghraib scandal were issued soon after images of the abuse were leaked and therefore, importantly, amidst the (seemingly “endless” (Kohn, 2009)) Global War on Terror. The temporal divergences between the cases make them interesting to consider together as there are certainly differences in how the discourses operate to sustain and disavow a gendered politics of militarism and violence based on the apparent or actual temporal proximity of the event addressed.

Whilst discussing the choice of case studies, a delineation of conflict-related sexual violence would be beneficial. It should be noted that the categorisation of these cases as instances of conflict-related sexual violence is certainly not uncontested. Undoubtedly, the “comfort women” case has overwhelmingly been considered one of conflict-related sexual violence, so much so that it is almost paradigmatic, and other cases are often compared to it in terms of severity. However, the Abu Ghraib case is more blurred in terms of categorisation. Indeed, Gray and Stern (2019) have problematised the common link made by Feminist scholars between rape and torture, and have suggested that whilst this has strategically allowed for the recognition of conflict-related rape as a central problem, it has had the unintentional effect of associating rape with a form of violence which has, at times, been deemed necessary or legitimate, most often articulated through the apparent need to protect others. Of course, “categories of violence do not fall unproblematically or apolitically into neat, predefined or mutually exclusive categories that are pinned down in any final sense” (Gray and Stern, 2019: 7), and the distinctions between rape and torture can certainly be blurry – especially when the purpose of this violence is not immediately clear to the researcher. However, I justify my conception of both the Japanese imperial “comfort” system and the Abu Ghraib torture scandal as forms of conflict-related sexual violence in several ways.

First, though the logics of each instance of violence vary, they are both inherently connected to broad notions of militarism and warfare as an exceptional space of social relations. Second, as Chapter 6 of this book demonstrates, it was not the torture or “mistreatment” which occurred at Abu Ghraib military prison which made this event into a political scandal; rather, it was the sexualised and seemingly depraved methods of torture which caused such a controversy for the Bush administration – “trophy photographs” have existed throughout the Global War on Terror (Jakob, 2017), but less sexualised forms of violence simply have not been problematised in the same way as the pictures taken at Abu Ghraib for this very reason. Therefore, notwithstanding the embodied experience of torture, which may have the same or different impacts upon the individual who experiences it depending on whether it is implemented in a more or less sexualised manner, the specifically sexual and gendered nature of the violence at Abu Ghraib must be considered central to the entire framing of the scandal and the resulting apologies. In addition, key to my argument in Chapter 6 are reports that the act of rape was perpetrated against both male and female detainees by US military personnel at Abu Ghraib prison; however, this form of sexual violence and/or torture was simply not made visible in the photographs (or certainly not those released to the public) and in the discourse around the scandal presumably because it was not the kind of violence US military guards wanted to commemorate or that the media wanted to make public. For these reasons, both cases are considered instances of conflict-related sexual violence, but partic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The “liberal” apology and gender
• 3 “Excitable” apologies
• 4 Political apology, recognition, and “legitimate” gendered victimhood
• 5 The “comfort women” and apologies for sexual slavery
• 6 The Abu Ghraib scandal and apologies within the Global War on Terror
• 7 Gender and Political Apology: Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index