Challenging Hegemonic Understandings of Human Rights Violations in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission: The Need for a New Narrative

Abstract

As feminist critical social scholars, we understand our primary task is to make visible the way that hegemony functions to assert, reproduce, and maintain unequal power relations. We understand hegemony to refer to circumstances where meanings are so embedded in social relations and the social structure that representational and institutionalized power becomes naturalized, taken for granted and, therefore, almost invisible so that it goes uncontested (Silbey, 1998). This chapter focuses on the relationship between truth commissions and hegemony. We use the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a case study (hereafter the TRC).