Abstract
Memories are a crucial part of transitional justice work. However, consistent with the fact that the field has significantly neglected bodies (except in the sense of what has been done to them), complex body memories that both reside in and spill over from individual bodies have received little attention. This interdisciplinary article aims to address this gap and thus to foreground the fact that bodies tell their own stories. What enhances their storytelling potential in this regard is their relationships and interactions with their wider social ecologies. Fundamentally, body memories have important social dimensions that make them highly relevant to transitional justice. Drawing on qualitative interviews with victims-/survivors of conflict-related sexual violence in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Colombia and Uganda, the article’s core argument is that transitional justice processes should give more attention to body memories and to the potential they offer for developing the field in new embodied directions.
Highlights
Drawing on her experiences of childhood sexual violence, Culberston (1995: 180) reflects on the irony that ‘while the violator can enter the body of the violated, the rest of us, in trying to grasp the experience, are shut out’
In a chapter about the role of body memory in transitional justice, Beck (2014: 186) asks the key question: ‘How does the concept of body memory contribute to theorizing transitional justice?’. She maintains, ‘transform patterns of cognition and speech, and the habitual structures of the body, which are the basis for everyday action’ (Beck, 2014: 186). Taking this a step further, this article emphasizes the different ways that body memories affect the relationships between bodies and their environments, using this as a basis for developing its core argument that transitional justice processes should give more attention to such memories and to the potential they offer for developing the field in new embodied directions
The third section uses the interview data to empirically look at body memories and demonstrate why they matter for transitional justice
Summary
Drawing on her experiences of childhood sexual violence, Culberston (1995: 180) reflects on the irony that ‘while the violator can enter the body of the violated, the rest of us, in trying to grasp the experience, are shut out’. Taking this a step further, this article emphasizes the different ways that body memories affect the relationships between bodies and their environments, using this as a basis for developing its core argument that transitional justice processes should give more attention to such memories and to the potential they offer for developing the field in new embodied directions The third section uses the interview data to empirically look at body memories and demonstrate why they matter for transitional justice To do so, it situates these memories within a wider social context, exploring how they affect individuals’ interactions with their surrounding ecologies. The final section develops the argument that bodies and their memories point to new and under-explored embodied ways of dealing with the past
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