Emotional and Gendered Sense-Making through Apologies for Conflict-Related Sexual Violence

This article examines the specific, gendered discourses, which can be uncovered within political apologies for conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) and sexualized torture. While apologies are often perceived as either cynical, normatively “empty” gestures that seek to carry out strategic interests or as attempts by political actors to (albeit, often inadequately) emphasize their commitment to addressing past violence and associated cultures of impunity, a feminist analysis of two cases of apology for CRSV (the Japanese imperial “comfort women” and the United States’ infamous Abu Ghraib torture “scandal”) demonstrates that political apologies are rich affective–discursive, deliberately emotional sites at which CRSV is explained and/or accounted for by the state. Specifically, I trace how political apologies operate to discursively and affectively claim and renounce institutional responsibility for CRSV through the common-sense but “slippery” gendered logics of rational/emotional and public/private.