Rehearsing forgiveness by acting out vengeance: the case of ‘mother of the rapist’ in embodied research practice with war-rape survivors

ABSTRACT

This paper shows how the turn from narrative to embodied research practice offers a space to women survivors of war-related sexual violence to rehearse forgiveness in the post-conflict setting, where its realisation seems unimaginable in the face of the extent of the crimes committed and the current sociopolitical situation. Using the case of ‘Mother of the Oppressor’, a short performative act created through the ethnographic research process, the topics around the relationship between survivors’ individual desires to forget, the pain stored in their bodies, and the collective demand from different social and political institutions to forgive are being discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• War-rape survivors
• embodied research
• vengeance
• forgiveness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Nena Močnik is post-doctoral researcher at Turku Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Turku, Finland. She is the author of Sexuality after War Rape: From Narrative to Embodied Research (Routledge, 2017) and author of several forum theatre performances on human rights violation and her own monodrama, Konzervirano (engl. ‘Canned’).

Notes

1. Chetnik is a pejorative term for a Serbian perpetrator that refers to the nationalist Serbian militia operating during the Second World War.