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Memory in Interaction: Gender-Based Violence, Genocide, and Commemoration

Societies often institutionally commemorate histories marred by atrocity crimes through the development of permanent memorials in efforts to create a national collective memory. While scholars have documented the gendered silences within collective memories more generally, the processes that variously enforce and/or break such silences are less clear. In analyzing these silences—as well as resistance against them—across three memorials in Rwanda, I argue that memorial characteristics (physicality, orientation, and internal structure) affect the extent to which certain narratives of victimhood are remembered or forgotten. By analyzing the dynamics of memorialization on a micro level, what I call “memory-in-interaction,” we can better understand the process through which national narratives come to exclude or include experiences of gendered violence. Such processes reveal that a difficult past, such as one wrought with mass rape, can be silenced, even within a political climate in which women are otherwise heavily represented in government, policy, and civic life, suggesting that women’s promising inclusion in some public realms does not ensure their inclusion in others.