Keeping Memories Alive: Collective and Individual Narratives about Sexual Violence

Abstract

For my master's thesis I researched a book with testimonials about sexual violence during the 1994 Rwandan genocide: "The Men Who Killed Me". During this genocide approximately 250,000 to 500,000 women were raped or in other ways sexually violated. I was especially interested in the practice of remembrance and the following research question takes central stage in this thesis: In what way do individual as well as collective narratives of sexual violence contribute to remembrance practices of the Rwandan genocide? I looked at this question from different angles: memory, representation, 'the body' and affect. I analyzed the collective narrative(s) (for exampe: how the book was put together, how they represented the interviewees, etc.) and two individual narratives.