Week Three: Contemporary Feminist Debate - Lecture

Feminist Theory, Transitional Justice and the Arts

How to deal with the legacy of past oppression?

Our goal of inclusiveness, equality is accepted as something to fight for. A lot has been achieved, but a lot more is necessary to fight for.

How to be effective with those who potentially are your allies. The most difficult encounter are with those who are potentially on your side. Good-willing progressive scholars will take the helm, but that doesn't mean our goal has been reached. Our goal is more than inclusivity, it is about political representation, how do we want to be made present?

Bell and Rourke - We have the discourse of transitional justice
Transitional justice - when regimes move from less democratic to more democratic regimes, to more socially just, how to include those who have been excluded.
How do you transform a system that is intrinsically based on excluding those you want to exclude?

Regimes that move from right to left - the exclusion in their system was legal, perpetrators under the original system were just doing their job.

Feminism is more than just 'adding' women, that doesn't mean you're doing a feminist job. It is just the beginning. When those who have been excluded join the conversation, how does it change. 

Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas - war was the outcome of the patriarchal system - based on narcism, militarism, masculinity, competitiveness. The only thing we can do to prevent war is to step out of this system. She understood that you have to participate in interconnected systems, if you pull one thread, other things have to disconnect.

Bell and Rourke - Transitional Justice meets Feminism

• Growing feminist unease with transitional justice discourse
• Where are the women (Women suffer disproportionally from armed conflict i.e. what is the problem, whose problem, whose peace) Male involvement in negotiation, women suffer disproportionately from armed conflict, when women are part of the conversation an analysis of the problem should change
• Where is gender (Women's experience of gender based violence, rape, forced prostitution, sexual slavery and the problem of being revictimised)
• Where is feminism (What are the goals of transitional justice and peace, where is the power analysis in the creation of peace) The importance of socio-economic issues in feminist interventions, influencing the definition of harm and including non-elite actors. 

Conflict is very rarely analysed from a feminist perspective. Solving the military conflict without taking into account the socio-economic effects of the conflict.

A gendered analysis of peace and wars, we have to be pragmatic, we are trying to confront feminist theory with a neo-liberal critique. The most important thing for women post-conflict is the class and economic issue, as the decisions are usually made by those who are least effected. 

What kind of transition do you want to set in motion? In post-conflict context, the socio-economic intersection has to be prioritised, and then gender rights will follow. 

What is at stake? Which difference within each category do we have to take into account? What kind of aspect of the problem do we overlook? - Feminist theory and it's self-reflexivity. It is a dynamic enterprise that constantly needs fine-tuning. 

• What exactly is transitional justice transiting from and to? 
• The three kinds of justice according to Bell and Rourke:
• Ordinary justice (conceptual and practical difficulties to get women's issue addressed)
• Liberating justice (facilitating reconciliation and liberalisation, pushing for accountability specific cases, conceptual difficulties in regards to the western concept of liberalism, othering the non-western women and/or feminists)
• Restorative justice (restoring broken communities and relationships, different textured forms of accountability)

Truth and reconciliation commission: including the non-elite in the new national archive, reanalyse how people relate to each other. Only by means of working through these perspective can something new emerge.

Revolution is to break with the old from a preset idea of what should be the new - you have an ideology you want to implement.

Revolt comes from revolvere which means working through the meaning/effect something is built up. You try during this working through to analyse how it is built. In order to create something new (way of being, identity) to open up a future, a truth commission has potentially a better starting point of creating new ways of being than a revolution. 

A revolution replaces one power system with another without working out what was wrong with the first. To revolt is to go back to the past and stop the compulsion to repeat the past, it is how the unconscious rules our interactions. 

The only way to think about change is through the concept of revolt - going back to the past in order to create a new future, which you do not know how it will look. You only know that you want to include perspectives and voices that have been included. 

"...the revolt is concerned with a turning point in the relationship between the individual cultural revolt always also affects society. The revolt is reversal, a relocation, a transformation, but also a return; it is the most powerful and promising force within our culture." Kristeva

"The underlying thought behind such a psychoanalytical line of thinking is that the articulation of the repressed clears the way to liberate the subject of mechanisms of repetition. In other words: working through enables both new relations of signification and novel representation."

When understood as an individual working through of existing relations of signification, revolt has serious political implications; it asks for a different politics - the politics of permanent contestation."

If you really want to come up with something new, you have to go back and understand the here and now, from how the here and now history was interpreted. 

What has art got to do with this?

Artists relate to change in politics - work with materials that are part of history.

S.A - data produced in the Truth and Reconciliation Committee and make art with it - literally working through material of oppression. 

Wim Botha - took books that were instrumental to the apartheid to make busts (Afrikaans dictionaries which were forced on native speakers). 

If you want to be effective in implementation of change, you need to change the structure and how things relate to each other. 

In taking on meta (material) that already has meaning and is already formed, you then form it in a different way, then you have done something that cannot be undone.