Commemoration and Claim making: The Uses and Abuses of Representing the Chinese Indonesian Women Mass Rapes
Monika S W Doxey (Australian National University)
This paper discusses how the commemoration of a nation’s crimes against its citizen, specifically women of a minority ethnic group is crucial to their social positioning in the complex struggle of defining national identity belonging. Preconceived notions of the interrelations between gender, class and ethnicity of Chinese Indonesian women are also challenged in this paper.
Two transnational texts are examined: five years on a commemorative book of survivor testimonies edited by KOMNAS, the Indonesian National Commission Against Violence to Women and an Australian SBS government ‘multicultural’ channel Dateline program documentary shown by a Chinese Diaspora group in Sydney in their commemoration ceremony of the rapes. Chinese Indonesian women’s traumatic experiences and its commemoration Are used to define not only the boundaries of community and custom but also used as symbols and cultural underpinnings for claim making process. The KOMNAS group is here argued as taking up the rhetoric of gender and uses rape survivor testimony in a gender and narrative therapy framework, to further its political campaign to stop violence against women and claim the rights of women’s equal empowerment. While the Diasporic Chinese group is here argued to use viewing of the Australian SBS documentary and the western discourse on human rights in their commemoration ceremony as part of their claim for rights as equal citizens using the rhetoric of race or ethnicity. Although both groups have had success in their claim making agendas, using and representing a traumatic experience as part of the process must be re-examined especially the inherent limits, ethical implications and exclusions this possess. An alternative framework of representation is discussed called transmemoration where the specificity of the Chinese Indonesian women’s experience are not assimilated into a more globalised women’s experiences of rape or Chinese experience of racism.
