The gendered politics of recognition and recognizability through political apology

Abstract

This article focuses on the performative recognition offered to victims through political apologies for conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV). It engages with understandings of political apology as an act of acknowledgment and moral visibility that has the capacity to further include marginalized accounts of violence or injustice within exclusive national histories/memberships. I introduce feminist understandings of visibility as ambivalent alongside a differential politics of “grievability” in order to suggest that political apologies must always recognize and make visible particular accounts of violence and subject positions; however, they simultaneously obscure others. I problematize the gendered and gendering effects of this process in relation to two cases of apology for CRSV: the Japanese imperial “comfort women” and the US Abu Ghraib torture scandal during the Global War on Terror (GWoT).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This is not to say that there is any kind of blueprint for apologies and/or wider redress that will be considered as acceptable or appropriate by victim groups (Bentley, 2021, p. 3; MacLachlan, 2019).

2 This has not been the case. Tensions between Japanese and South Korean authorities are ongoing, with a recent court battle leading to Japanese politicians claiming they do not owe the comfort women reparations, citing diplomatic immunity.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emma Dolan

Emma Dolan is lecturer in peace and development studies at the University of Limerick, Ireland. She works on themes of gender, peace, and conflict studies. Her first monograph, Gender and Political Apology: When the Patriarchal State Says “Sorry” is now available online and in print via Routledge. She has also had her work published in International Feminist Journal of Politics; Gender, Place and Culture; and Childhood.