Gendered silences in post-conflict societies: a typology

Abstract

This article offers new theoretical insights into the relationship between silence, gender and agency. Bridging feminist research and critical peace research, the article considers the gendered practices of making and breaking silence in the aftermath of war and armed conflict. A typology is proposed along the axes of (a) disabling and enabling silences, and (b) social remembering and forgetting. Drawing on a number of illustrative cases, the typology is used to identify and categorise modes and functions of gendered silence, and show how oxymoronic fluctuations between silence and speech play out in the everyday. Silence can be employed for subordination and erasure, but can also be a strategy for coping with a precarious everyday, a form of tacit communication of ambiguity as well as a claim-making strategy. Unpacking the gendered dimensions of silence reveals power dynamics with deep implications for societies transitioning from war. ARTICLE HISTORY

Remembering and silencing complexity in post-genocide memorialisation: Cambodia’s Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

“…This ties into recent work that highlights the importance of not only what is remembered, but also what is forgotten or silenced (Buckley-Zistel, 2009; Connerton, 2008; Eastmond and Mannergren Selimovic, 2012; Mannergren Selimovic, 2020; Mason and Sayner, 2019). Silences go beyond a mere absence of speech and can communicate as much about memory of the past as any spoken narrative, allowing positive and negative attributions, as well as ambiguity to be communicated through the silence (Eastmond and Mannergren Selimovic, 2012: 506).…”

“…With this silence, a part of the complexity of political action cannot be understood properly, and the grey zones of victimhood and perpetration that are so important in understanding mass violence are rendered invisible. As such, while silences at the individual level are portrayed as being potentially empowering and providing the possibility of agency (Mannergren Selimovic, 2020; Porter, 2016), here the silences function more to disable and facilitate forgetting, and as such the silences become a ‘tool used to uphold hegemonic discourses and erase dissonant aspects of the past’ (Mannergren Selimovic, 2020: 2). This ties into the type of memory politics that Connerton (2008) labels ‘prescriptive forgetting’ (p. 61).…”

Skirts as Flags: Transitional Justice, Gender and Everyday Nationalism in Kosovo

“…Such stigmatization persists owing to normative, structural, and political factors (Graybill, ; Krog, ; Simic, ). As a consequence, women's suffering is unacknowledged, impacting the prospects of redress for injustice—despite calls for a subtler understanding of silence as an agential act that is empowering (Porter, 2012, p. 35; Mannergren Selimovic, ).…”

Understanding conflict-related sexual violence and the ‘everyday’ experience of conflict through witness testimonies

“…See Mucić Transcript, 3 April 1997: 1777-1778, 1784, 1800 12.The decision not to testify in criminal trials may also represent an assertion of agency by victims. For a discussion of the relationship between gender, agency and voice/silence, see Selimovic (2018).…”

“…This research has both highlighted and challenged conventional binaries of women as passive victims and of men as perpetrators of CRSV. By attending to gendered narratives and silences, feminist studies offer a fuller understanding of whether and how agency emerges in (post-)war contexts (Porter, 2016;Selimovic, 2018). Crucially, gender analyses of transitional justice open up space to consider 'agents, spaces, and processes of agency that may be hidden, ignored, or misrepresented' (Björkdahl and Selimovic, 2015: 166).…”