Gender, Transitional Justice and Memorial Arts

Global Perspectives on Commemoration and Mobilization

Jelke Boesten, Helen Scanlon, Jelke Boesten, Helen Scanlon

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000389609
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Arte
• Categoría: Arte y política

This book examines the role of post-conflict memorial arts in bringing about gender justice in transitional societies.

Art and post-violence memorialisation are currently widely debated. Scholars of human rights and of commemorative arts discuss the aesthetics and politics not only of sites of commemoration, but of literature, poetry, visual arts and increasingly, film and comics. Art, memory and activism are also increasingly intertwined. But within the literature around post-conflict transitional justice and critical human rights studies, there is little questioning about what memorial arts do for gender justice, how women and men are included and represented, and how this intertwines with other questions of identity and representation, such as race and ethnicity. The book brings together research from scholars around the world who are interested in the gendered dimensions of memory-making in transitional societies. Addressing a global range of cases, including genocide, authoritarianism, civil war, electoral violence and apartheid, they consider not only the gendered commemoration of past violence, but also the possibility of producing counter-narratives that unsettle and challenge established stereotypes.

Aimed at those interested in the fields of transitional justice, memory studies, post-conflict peacebuilding, human rights and gender studies, this book will appeal to academics, researchers and practitioners.

1 Gender and the arts of transition

Jelke Boesten and Helen Scanlon

Gender, Transitional Justice and Memorial Arts explores the links between gendered memorialisation of historic violence and the concomitant growth of artivism and protest that often emerges in societies grappling with abusive pasts. Memorials and commemorative practices play a critical role in struggles over the renegotiation of political and social life after violence, contributing to setting national norms of what and who is valued within the polity (Abousnnouga and Machin 2010, Poulter 2018, Sylvester 2019). From this perspective, commemorative practices can provide an opportunity to reflect on past injustice with the aim to (re)shape the future. As has been indicated in the political realm more broadly, transitions can provide opportunities for more inclusive narratives that unsettle harmful gender norms, rather than reinforce them. Recognising this potential of memorial arts this book aims to a) provide a feminist critique of commemorative practices through case studies on sites of commemoration, b) raise questions around commemorative practices as forms of symbolic reparation within processes of transitional justice and c) highlight how artivism can provide transformative gendered perspectives about the past and the present. Our intent is to shine a feminist lens on memory practices globally and illuminate how memorial arts are intrinsic to the past, present and future of transitional justice.

This book derives from a context of global political upheaval and polarisation where threats to respect for human diversity, equality and solidarity, and for our environment, have become widespread. In response, women have been visible at the forefront of battles to uphold these rights, not least because their physical safety is in the balance. Yet, current feminist protest is clearly deeply rooted in the persistent levels of physical, sexual and symbolic violence that permeate our societies. In countries with histories of violence and oppression, feminist activism against gendered violence draws on the broader injustices and recent memories of political violence to denounce the continuing abuse women receive in their homes, on the street, at work, and indeed, in politics, and point at the complicity of the state and its leaders in fomenting impunity and legitimising violence. Hence, today’s struggle for women’s rights and autonomy is an intersectional struggle against those postcolonial inequalities and heteronormativity that impact LGBTQ communities, ethnic minorities and indigenous people. While the current political climate certainly raises questions regarding the erosion of legal equalities gained over the last 50 or so years, it is the violence that never ceased that is the primary motivation of mobilisation. Studying the politics of memory, arts and transition allows us to look for those threads that exist between understandings of past and present gender-based violence.

In Latin America, feminist mobilisation across the continent was first inspired by the murder of Mexican poet and activist Susana Chávez Castillo in 2011,¹ who had campaigned against the very high levels of unresolved femicides on the Mexican border with the United States. In response to Chávez Castillo’s murder, a movement started around her slogan Ni una mujer menos, ni una muerte más (‘not another death, not a woman less’). Four years after Castillo herself was tortured and killed in Juarez, activists in Uruguay, Mexico, Chile and Argentina began organising campaigns and demonstrations to protest against femicide and violence against women more generally, employing her slogan Ni Una Menos. The movement received new impetus in May 2016, when Brazilian activists organised demonstrations in response to highly mediatised cases of rape; a couple of months later, Peruvian activists also mobilised after the perpetrators of two cases of physical and sexual violence were largely absolved by the courts (Boesten 2018).

Likewise, in sub-Saharan Africa, movements seeking to demonstrate intolerance for sexual and gender-based violence are growing; in South Africa in 2019, thousands of women took to the streets after the death of a 19-year-old university student, Uyinene Mrwetyana, who was raped and killed by a post office worker in Cape Town. Women mobilised across the country and initiated a campaign called #AmINext. The protests focused attention on the fact that 137 sexual offences are committed per day in a country where rates of femicide – women murdered by husbands, lovers and exes – are five times the global average. These protests followed the 2018 #totalshutdown movement, which saw mass action by thousands of women and organisations such as Gender Dynamix, Saartjie Baartman Centre for Women and Children and Ubuntu Rural Women calling for government action against the high rates of gender-based violence – this in a country that for so long had been the poster child of ‘peaceful’ transitions. Similarly, women took to the streets of the major cities in Kenya in March 2019. Activist Renoh Amollo called out: ‘There is a war against our bodies, there is a war against Kenyan women and together we are raising our voices to say no to this femicide and violence against women’ (Ombuor 2019).

Highlighting impunity for historical wrongs can be a powerful tool in struggles for accountability in the present. In South Korea, protests have been held every Wednesday in the capital Seoul during which activists agitate for both material and symbolic reparations from the Japanese government for the abduction of young Korean women for military sex slavery during the Second World War. This mobilisation has resulted in the growth of the transnational movement of the Butterfly Fund, which strives to ensure the stories of women subject to sexual violence in conflict are no longer silenced. Through initiatives such as the ‘uncomfort women’, the 100 million–signature campaign that launched the 2019 Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict week, activists are challenging the stigma that has historically shrouded gender-based violence. These movements are a testament to how memorial arts often embed critiques of both past and present-day violence and injustice and thus provide a critical tool in forging reflection and communicating complex issues to wider audiences.

This book thus aims to explore the many hidden memory battles about gendered representations of historic violence. In particular, the book explores cultural memorial productions in the field of commemoration and the arts in an attempt to ‘visibilise’ the gendered component of memory politics. For the purpose of the book, we are understanding gender in relationship to reparations as something that international law attempts to address by seeking to restore ‘victims/survivors’. However, we argue these interventions have generally failed to address the vulnerabilities that allowed violations to occur in the first place. As such, we are interested in feminist activism in the realm of reparative justice – that is, interventions that allow for the creation of counter-memory and in turn subvert gendered power relations. As Kurze and Lamont (2019) confirm, art in response to or as part of transitional justice processes is strongly linked to political activism, and it is indeed this link between art, transitional justice and activism that we are interested in analysing from a feminist perspective.

Memorial arts are increasingly recognised as a means to visibilise, and as a tool to pressurise, wider society to recognise the scale and depth of the problem of violence against women. In order to explore this, the authors in this book look at formal sites of commemoration and more informal/bottom-up cultural interventions, as well as activist art, or artivism, in countries as diverse as Namibia, Brazil, Peru, South Korea and South Africa. Despite the range of contexts, the chapters included in this book all cite memory politics as a key space for thinking about transformative gender justice. By providing a global perspective on the politics of memory around gender-based violence, we wish to emphasise the power of arts as protest, and hence, their potential for symbolic reparation.

Transitional justice and symbolic reparations

Since the 1990s, transitional justice has become the widely accepted global framework to address histories of authoritarianism or conflict in order to facilitate transitions to democracy, greater inclusion and, importantly, non-repetition. Transitional justice processes include both judicial and non-judicial mechanisms such as criminal justice, truth-seeking, reparations, lustration and security sector reform. Debates about both the theory and practice of gender and transitional justice emerged in the late 1990s, largely as a result of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as well as the increased attention to conflict-related sexual violence emerging as a result of the International Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Reflecting this growing awareness, since 2000 the United Nations has designed a comprehensive set of security council resolutions and guidelines with regard to gender, conflict and post-conflict transitions.

As thinking on transitional justice has evolved, so has the establishment of principles of international law to guide the implementation of reparative justice (OHCHR 2005). According to the United Nations 2005 Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparations, reparations are intended to repair past wrongs as well as to help build sustainable peace (UN 2010). As a result, states responsible for gross violations of human rights have a legal obligation to provide reparations. Reparations are, thus, measures intended to acknowledge the experiences and needs of victims of human rights violations, and may consist of material benefits as well as symbolic gestures that attempt to restore their dignity and physical integrity, compensate them for their losses, recognise the irreparable harms they have suffered and contribute to addressing the social and economic vulnerabilities that may have led to their victimisation. In contexts where transitional justice is pursued, reparations measures are often deemed critical for the nation’s renewal. These measures can be combined and implemented through programmes administered by the state and may be provided to victims as individuals or as members of collectives or communities of victims. The International Centre for Transitional Justice, established in 2001 to provide expert advice globally in the field of TJ practice and process, took up the challenge to look specifically at the workings of reparations in gendered terms. Two resulting books published in 2006 and 2009, both edited by Ruth Rubio-Marín, remain the most comprehensive overview of what reparation programmes do for women on the one hand, and for unsettling harmful gender norms on the other (Rubio-Marín 2006, 2009).

The central dilemma for those invested in transformative reparations is ensuring how programmes can seek to do more than ‘repairing what was broken’, and instead provide avenues to look forward (Boesten and Wilding 2015). Debates over transitional or transformative justice have continued to shape discussions around gender justice and have increasingly recognised the importance of symbolic reparations. Symbolic reparations, according to the United Nations, are an essential element in providing victims with adequate recognition and redress as a form of justice. Of the five basic principles that should inform reparation programmes, ‘satisfaction’ is an essential element to provide victims with appropriate recognition and facilitate reintegration into the polity as citizens. Critical to symbolic reparations is the acknowledgement of past harms through formal apologies, the creation or reinvention of museums and commemorative sites and the facilitation of exhumations and burials. In some cases such as Hungary and South Africa, and more recently in response to imperial relics in the UK and USA, it may even involve the removal of monuments associated with abusive pasts. However, since history is a contested space where different factions in politics and society clash, sometimes material reparations, collective or individual, have proved easier to administer than symbolic reparations that rely on fractured and contested memories.

Nonetheless, many post-conflict and post-authoritarian settings have seen civil society mobilise to ensure that more nuanced versions of the past are visible in the public realm. These may manifest through alternative sites of memory or as artistic interventions such as performative protests. These ‘organic’ forms of symbolic reparations often prove to be an effective mechanism to unsettle the structures that underpin wrongdoing, and in so doing, create a counter-memory.

However, in these memory battles, ‘gender’, either as an analytical category or as a reflection of differentiated experience, is often overlooked. But, as Hirsch and Smith point out, ‘cultural memory is always about the distribution of and contested claims to power’ – and gender is always about differentiated power relations (Hirsch and Smith 2002). Likewise, constructions of collective memory (or cultural memory) are influenced by race and class; an intersectional perspective that takes into account gender, race and class as elements of persistent inequality throughout the world is thus essential. As Marianne Hirsch proposes in her introduction to Women Mobilizing Memory, we need to be sensitive to an ethics of transculturality: we can be aware of particularity and difference, including in how inequality works in different places and spaces, while also being transnational and solidary (Hirsch in Altınay et al. 2019). Our intent in Gender, Transitional Justice and Memorial Arts is to further this perspective through advancing a feminist perspective on memorial arts into the field of transitional justice and, in particular, the debate around symbolic reparations.

A failure to include gender dynamics in ongoing memory debates during transitions to democracy (as well as in ‘established’ democratic contexts such as South Korea and Canada) risks concealing how violence, marginalisation and trauma have gendered effects and reverberates through so-called peacetime. This, in turn, allows physical and sexual violence against women to become further entrenched, instead of challenged as part of a post-conflict transition. As Nayanika Mookherjee shows in relation to Bangladesh (2015), explicitly naming gendered harm and female victims of violence may also stigmatise and stereotype. South Africa provides an example of what happens if gendered constructions of masculinity and femininity, and of violence and power relations, are not considered as part of conversations and practices of reconstruction, justice and reparation. As Scanlon (2015), Gqola (2015), Durbach (2016) and others have shown, the ongoing crisis in gendered violence is strongly linked to unresolved intergenerational trauma, marginalisation and underlying intersectional inequalities and violence that have largely been ignored in the transitional project...