Description
To memorialize sexual violence is particularly difficult, because histories of sexual violence are veiled in multiple layers of silence. While feminist historiographies are concerned with practices of un-silencing to establish hitherto silenced knowledges, their reliance on silence-and-speech as each other’s alleged either/or alternatives risks to sustain marginalization as it feeds un-silenced histories into existing structures and thereby intensifies rather than un-does marginalization. This paper addresses challenges to narrating and problematizing sexual violence in feminist activism and analysis by differentiating un-silencing practices from a constitutive approach to feminist historiography. It suggests that while gendered memories, understood as the products of prior histories, end up as descriptions of former comfort women’s ordeals that leave the constitutive conditions of possibility of those histories unchallenged. By instead understanding mnemonic practices as epistemic regimes that connect the past to the present, the paper highlights how women’s classed, gender and raced positionalities condition contemporary descriptions of their roles at war and circumscribe sexualities in the war’s aftermath. The paper illuminates how the contextualization of survivors’ war experiences as parts of their everyday lives at the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace in Tokyo highlights multiple structures of marginalization and thereby unsettle official silencing.
