Gendered suffering and the complexities of keeping silent

Abstract

Reliving the past in everyday life may function as a constant reminder of an individual’s past traumatic experiences, and if the person is not offered space in which to deal with these memories, silencing persists. Many people who lived through colonisation and other oppressive regimes carry what scholars refer to as “hidden transcripts”: secret histories or experiences that go unrecounted. Lack of power and inequalities within various societies lead to the silencing of some people’s voices. With the advent of democracy and the Gender Equality Commission in South Africa, one would imagine that the silence would be broken; however, many stories (those of women in particular) remain unheard. The role played by gender in our quest to understand people’s experiences of suffering in post-conflict situations has largely been unresearched. Many women existed and many continue to exist within oppressive systems, and it is therefore crucial to acknowledge their social suffering as women first and foremost. By talking about suffering in general and universalising terms, we run the risk of “re-colonising” these women and their experiences. In this article, I invite a critical re-thinking of how we understand suffering as it relates to both the individual and the collective, and call for the acknowledgement of gender as a unit of analysis.