Gender Justice and Memorial Arts: from Symbolic Reparation to Protest Movement

• In Event: Enduring Injustices: Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Class in Peru

Abstract

Memorial arts –commemorative events and exhibitions- are increasingly seen as necessary symbolic reparation of harms done, particularly in the case of gendered harms, but it is questionable to what extend formal commemoration does indeed do justice. This paper asks how memorial arts in post conflict Peru are gendered, and if and how such portrayals contribute to gender justice or not. Who is being commemorated in Peru’s memory museums, how and with what message for the future? Do cultural representations of the past in art, theatre, literature that emerge from civil society a form of counter-memory that is more radical, unsettling, or feminist? When do representations of the past become activism, and how? Can activism in itself be a form of symbolic reparation? Drawing on cultural representations of conflict-related gender based violence as well as on uses of protest art in the current wave of feminist activism, the paper intends to draw parallels between conflict related symbolic reparation and ongoing gender violence.

Author

• Jelke Boesten, King's College London