The 'Comfort Women' and the Silence Breakers: Memorialising Sexual Violence as Feminist Politics

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This project focuses on the memorialisation of sexual violence across what feminists have termed the 'continuum of violence' spanning war and peace. It is interdisciplinary, drawing on insights from critical International Relations as well as political theory, sociology, social movement studies, gender studies, and art studies. It begins from the assumption that memorialisation is never a politically neutral act. Rather, the politics of memory are important, contested, potentially transformative, and imperative to understanding contemporary feminist struggles. In many cases, memorialisation serves to reinforce the (gendered and racialised) status quo. However, it can also present an opportunity to disrupt dominant ideas. Against this broad backdrop, I analyse a cluster of sexual violence memorialisation projects that have appeared in the last decade across the USA. I focus on six memorials: three dedicated to peacetime sexual violence in the US, and three to the 'comfort women' of the Asia-Pacific War. The study makes a number of contributions to knowledge. First, it will produce in-depth, qualitative data focused on understanding the memorials themselves. This will include interview data created through interviews with activists, designers, and others involved in the establishment of the memorials; in-depth, thick descriptions of how the memorials look; and visual data in the form of photographs. In addition, the project will also conduct a systematic analysis of newspaper articles about the memorials, allowing me to understand how they have been portrayed in the media. Taken together, these data will chart the stories that the different memorials tell about violence; the struggles and processes through which they came into being; and their interventions into public debates. This will create detailed knowledge about the memorial projects themselves. Second, the focus of the project on memorials concerned with sexual violence in both war and peace allows it to make a theoretical contribution by developing academic debates on how ideas about gender, violence, and (national) identity shape the ways in which different forms of sexual violence are understood. This is important because how sexual violence is understood shapes how it is responded to.In addition, the project will also advance our understanding of how memorialisation can be used as an effective tool by activists wanting to end sexual violence in both war and peace. Together with activists involved in each of the memorialisation projects, I will develop an 'activist toolkit' that aims to help would-be memorial activists to think through their ideas and turn their plans into a reality. Finally, a project blog will provide space for a contextualisation of the memorials through a broader consideration of the production of public memory of sexual violence. By exploring cultural products including memoirs, poetry, and TV representations, the blog will provide space for rich open-ended discussions and creative thinking about how public memory of sexual violence is constructed. This will enable further reflection on how thinking about sexual violence through art, poetry, statues, and so on can help us to think differently about what sexual violence is and how it could be effectively tackled.