Memories of Violence in Interviews With Basque Nationalist Women

Hamilton, Carrie

doi:10.4324/9780203391471_chapter_6

Cited by 5 publications

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“…Third, Adele's way of navigating the terrain of a divided memory culture not by taking sides with one of the rival camps but by exposing how both of them are silencing important aspects of the past, is apparently not unique. In a study on the personal memories of female members of the Basque ETA, Hamilton (2003a) has thus for example shown how her interviewees' accounts render visible both, the silences in official narratives of the Spanish state and in the narratives of fellow male militants who in line with traditional storylines tend to conceal the role of women. While it remains a task for future research to explore empirically how often this phenomenon occurs, the concept of agonistic memory can function as a sensitizing concept which alerts us to the theoretical significance of these occurrences.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Drawing attention to the political and interventionist character of oral history accounts, these studies—without using the concept—thus single out features which play a prominent role in academic discourses on agonistic memory as well. However, due to the fact that many authors have devoted their primary interest to other aspects by exploring, for example, variation among the perspectives voiced by different people at different times (Cornejo et al, 2020; Heimo and Peltonen, 2003; Mihelj, 2013), investigating narrative patterns evoked in the effort to deal with trauma (Blackburn, 2009; High, 2015; Ricatti, 2019; Skultans, 2014; Thomson, 2015) or reconstructing the articulation of gendered identities (Hamilton, 2003a; Stephens, 2010; Summerfield, 2004), these features have not been of pivotal concern so far. Looking at moments in which interviewees critically reflect on or even polemically intervene in public debates on issues of the past through the lens of the concept of agonistic memory can put them into the center of attention.…”

Section: Oral History and Memory Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Agonistic memory as a relational concept: Remembering socialism in Lithuania

Christophe

2022

Memory Studies

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Based on a biographical narrative interview, this article analyzes the policies of discursive positioning enacted by Adele, a history teacher born in the Lithuanian countryside in 1951, while telling her life story. Showing how she consistently disrupts two rival narratives, the misalignments between which inform public debate in Lithuania’s divided memory culture, I interpret her account as a bottom-up example of agonistic memory. To date, this mode of remembering the past has usually been described as the project of creative intellectuals. In order to prepare the ground to include the memory practices of the rank and file, I suggest (1) reconceptualizing agonistic memory as a relational concept and (2) using agonistic memory as a sensitizing concept in an analysis of oral history accounts focused on the positions articulated by interviewees in response to public memory discourses.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Oral History and Memory Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agonistic memory as a relational concept: Remembering socialism in Lithuania

Christophe

2022

Memory Studies

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“…28 However, Carrie Hamilton argues against categorizing these distortions as specific to trauma, when they are in any case such common features of memory recall. 29 Paula Hamilton argues that memory theory tends to be Eurocentric and to centre on the Holocaust, which is an inappropriate template for indigenous memories tied to specific places within local group memory formations. 30 With regard to the treatment of Aboriginal groups in Australia, Hamilton stresses that the trauma-therapy ethic has encouraged many groups to adopt a potentially damaging position of 'strategic victimhood'.…”

Section: Re Ective Spacesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Memory and nostalgia

Legg

2004

cultural geographies

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“…Because of the scarcity of recorded information on women's roles in ETA, in some parts of the article I have supplemented written sources with material from interviews I conducted in 1996-1997 with women who had been ETA activists from the 1960s to 1980s. For more detailed qualitative analysis of these interviews, see Hamilton, 2000aHamilton, , 2000bHamilton, and 2003 5 See for example Cooper (1979) and Benson et al (1982). gender hierarchy, helped ensure that the new radical nationalism would be a predominantly male movement.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Gender Politics of Political Violence: Women Armed Activists in ETA

Hamilton

2007

Feminist Review

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This article aims to contribute to the developing area of feminist scholarship on women and political violence, through a study of women in one of Europe's oldest illegal armed movements, the radical Basque nationalist organization ETA. By tracing the changing patterns of women's participation in ETA over the past four decades, the article highlights the historical factors that help explain the choice of a small number of Basque women to participate directly in political violence, and shows how these factors have differed from those for men. While the gender politics of radical nationalism are intricately linked to cross-cultural associations of militarism with certain forms of masculinity, the article also stresses the importance of understanding women's activism in ETA in the context of the organization's characteristic as an ethnic nationalist movement, as well as the wider historical circumstances of the movement's development, including the modernization of Spanish and Basque society over the past four decades. Although comparisons with women in other armed movements are possible, such historical specificities undermine any attempt to construct a universal theory of women and ‘terrorism’, such as Robin Morgan's ‘couple terrorism’ thesis. Finally, the article examines the changing representations of female ETA activists in the Spanish and Basque media. Although women ETA activists are now regarded as ‘normal’, popular representations continue to link women's armed activism with deviant sexuality and the transgression of their natural destiny as mothers. The different treatment of women is evident as well in claims of sexual torture made by some detainees. The article concludes that although the participation of women in political violence poses disquieting questions for the largely anti-militarist women's movement, case studies of women in armed organizations, as well as their place in the wider practices of conflict, are an important contribution both to feminist debates about violence and to wider studies of political violence.

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Memories of Violence in Interviews With Basque Nationalist Women

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

Agonistic memory as a relational concept: Remembering socialism in Lithuania

Agonistic memory as a relational concept: Remembering socialism in Lithuania

Memory and nostalgia

The Gender Politics of Political Violence: Women Armed Activists in ETA

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