Violating women: Gender, race and representation in South Africa's TRC

This project closely examines the representational politics of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in an effort to make sense of its historical and cultural legacy. In many ways, the TRC depoliticized history, memory and justice: victims were highly sentimentalized un-raced subjects, whose pain was the focus of knowledge about their experiences; perpetrators were extracted from the contexts that facilitated and encouraged their wrongdoing and constituted as individuals. Through theatrical sentimentalization of racialized oppression and individualization of wrongdoing, the commission distorted apartheid history of sexual, racial and gender oppression. The commission's masculine/feminine configurations of subjectivity and violence, along with its binary of perpetrators and victims foreclosed a nuanced understanding of how gender, ethnicity, race and class operated under apartheid. The commission, along with the media and the scholars of the commission tended to produce and reinforce a simplistic gender binary that ignored class, race and ethnicity issues that had been the fulcrum of apartheid ideology.;This project closely examines the gender question: what gender meant when the commission was first conceptualized, how gender came to be during the commission's run and what gender means in post-TRC South Africa. By problematizing the way gender is conflated with women, the tendency to ignore race, class and ethnicity when theorizing "South African women", the ready association of men with violence and by addressing the thorny issue of "women" perpetrators, this project hopes to offer a much more nuanced analysis of the TRC's gender politics. Rather than turning to TRC participants for my analysis -- witnesses, commissioners, journalists etc. -- my research reviews TRC scholarship and TRC generated texts, not because these participants are not important, but because not much of the TRC output has been so far subjected to closer academic scrutiny. I closely read the TRC Report, along with transcripts of testimonies and video footage of the hearings that are available either online or through the South African broadcasting Corporation (SABC), as well documents archived in the South African Historical Archive (SAHA) at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and elsewhere.