Description
Sexual violence, despite its devastating prevalence, has not often been represented in the built memorials that populate public spaces across the world. At the current moment in time, however, when multiple sites across the globe are witnessing renewed struggles over the interpretation of sexual violence, as well as hard-fought debate around the values that should be represented in public memorials, an increasing number of activist groups are choosing memorialisation as one way of claiming space and authority for their narratives around this form of harm. This paper draws on the preliminary findings of research that focuses on six memorials that have appeared in the last decade across the USA: three remembering the so-called ‘Comfort Women’ of the Asia-Pacific War, and three dedicated to the problem of ‘peacetime’ sexual violence within the contemporary US itself. Through paying attention to the stories that the memorials tell, how they are shaped by their political contexts, and the interventions they make into political debates, the study asks questions about how the mutually imbricated politics of gender, violence, and (national) identity inform contemporary struggles over the meaning of multiple forms of sexual violence. This paper explores the political collectives that the memorial projects seek to create by analysing how they interpellate those who view them as particular kinds of political subjects.
