Gendered Casualties: Memoirs in Activism and the Problem of Representing Violence

Abstract

Masculinity and nationalisms in Thailand during the 1970s served to enable gendered violence against activist women. Archival research and fieldwork reveal how feminist epistemologies and methods for studying memory are always gendered. Both conservative and leftist memories about the turbulent 1970s are rooted in a masculine notion of nationalism. Marginalizing the women's movement during the 1970s and forgetting the gendered violence against female activists during the October 6, 1976 massacre enables masculine nationalism.

The (in)visibility of violence: Jasmila Žbanić’s post-war cinema

“…She could be the trigger for a process of public remembrance directed at collective and personal healing, but she cannot be an active part of such a trajectory. She can only ‘speak nearby’, neither victimizing the women nor forgetting the violence (Trinh Minh-ha, in Musikawong, 2013: 200). 11 As Jelača (2016: 45) pinpoints, the gaze of the outsider is also ‘a device for unearthing suppressed truths about war crimes’, eliding ‘the more complicated aspects of local knowing and not knowing’.…”