Changing Spaces for Womens Voice in Oral Testimonial Collections of the Rwandan Genocide Against the Tutsi

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This project will explore the historiography and drivers behind two oral testimonial collections containing witness testimony of women's experience of sexual violence, by drawing on the Rwandan genocide against the Tutis and its aftermath. Despite advances to how we understand patterns of violence against women during the Holocaust, and in genocide more broadly, studies linking gender and genocide are rare. Furthermore, National Archive and Non-Government Organisation (NGO) projects contain large quantities of primary testimony, but systematic research on how this testimony has been gathered in an historical context hardly exist. My thesis chooses an interdisciplinary perspective at the intersection of historical studies, genocide studies, gender and memory by asking: How effectively can different methodological approaches help women to express the breadth of their experiences through witness testimony, especially when sexual violence is so often stigmatised in surrounding societies? The aim of this thesis is thus: it will first use an historical framework to assess how women's experience has been articulated through NGO practices in relation to the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi . Secondly, it will examine how contemporary methodologies used by NGOs, can either constrain or provide opportunities in the dialogue with survivors. Finally, using a sample of testimonies from the collections, it will analyse how women describe their experience of sexual violence during the genocide against the Tutsi, in their own words. By bringing this work into dialogue with feminist approaches, I will identify how the historical contextualisation of practice-based methodologies enable women to express their experience of sexual violence in genocide, and what such dialogues can add to contemporary thinking on typologies of conflict and non conflict related sexual violence.