ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst

A Story That Travels: The Transnational Narrative of Sexual Violence

Over the past two decades, the narrative of sexual harm has become the dominant form of memory project in terms of how we understand and remember the gendered content and dimensions of war. Drawing on research with women survivors of sexual violence during the armed conflict in Guatemala, this paper seeks to problematize and complicate the construction and location of this narrative of sexual harm, asking what may be lost in such hypervisibility. Of particular concern in the cementation of the ‘rape victim narrative’ is the reinforcement of the already hegemonic representation of particular (racialized) women as abject, and a resulting occlusion of women’s histories of resistance and contestation within the politics of everyday life. It is argued that violence is deeply social and relational, and so too is its narrative construction, and attention needs to be paid to the role and identity of the listener to the story of harm, who plays an integral role in shaping its form and content. Can the act of listening become one of consumption of the ‘pain of others,’ reinforcing the listener’s sense of moral superiority, her own subjectivity? It is important to make visible the transnational circuits of power that inform the relationship between listener and survivor, and the implication of histories of colonial and imperial intervention. In seeking to make visible the relations of power within narrative constructions of harm, the paper argues for a re-centering of women survivors’ complex and multifaceted struggles for agency and subjectivity.