Wound and Witness: The Gendered Politics of Transitional Justice in Bali, Indonesia

• In Event: 191. Still Unresolved Problems in the Indonesian Killings 1965-68. Sponsored by the Indonesian and Timor-Leste Studies Committee

Abstract

In the aftermath of Soeharto’s 32-year dictatorship, Indonesia has experienced an outpouring of testimony concerning the violence and terror that marked his regime. Yet the ongoing reluctance of post-Soeharto leaders to address past human rights abuses has led a number of international observers to describe transitional justice as having “failed” or been “derailed” in Indonesia. In this paper, I seek to bring concerns with gender, narrative and political subjectivity to bear on discussions of the failure of transitional justice in Indonesia, arguing for heightened attention to the gendered politics of speech, emotion and memory that have both enabled and constrained the witnessing subject. Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research with survivors of mass violence in Bali, I ask what it means to speak as a witness to atrocities, highlighting the deep ambivalence of the subject who is exhorted to speak in the register of the tragic, positioned and interpolated by new human rights languages whose affective politics demand the silencing of vital modes of experience. Drawing on Agamben’s (1999) articulation of testimony as the bearing witness to the unspeakable, on Balinese conceptions of aje were as a prohibition of dangerous speech, and on feminist critiques of the gendered limits of emotion demanded of the juridical witness to sexualized terror, I ask what new forms of Indonesian subjectivity may be emerging to give voice to both past and present violence. I conclude by considering how we might articulate a feminist theory of voice that refuses to bind survivors of violence to pre-figured testimonial registers.

Author

• Leslie Dwyer, George Mason University