Gendered Spaces of Terror and Assault: The Testimonio of REMHI and the Commission for Historical Clarification in Guatemala

On 25 February 1999, Guatemalans received the much anticipated report of the United Nations-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH), Memory of Silence, which detailed wartime atrocities and decades-long American support of the Guatemalan army. This document followed the earlier release of the Catholic church's own REMHI report (Recuperation of Historical Memory Inter-diocesan Project), Guatemala: never again . Using the recently released reports and databases of the CEH and REMHI, we explore the significant use of testimonio as a tool of shared witnessing, collective remembrance, and individual recollection of the special brutality directed against Maya women. Through testimonio, the outcomes of visible and invisible terror and violence in Guatemala are articulated as personal, social and geographic spaces of terror, all of which are gendered and racialised. With the civil war officially over, Maya women of Guatemala see the spaces of terror diminish. Given debates over testimonio, however, the grounds for assault and denial remain fertile.     

L'Édit de Nantes et l'indifférence hollandaise

Did the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes find, in the Netherlands, an echo comparable to the one caused by the revocation of this same Edict, a century later? A first inquiry through documents directly related to events of that period (letters of politicians, pamphlets, synod acts, etc.) do not provide any revealing account of a Dutch interest in the French biconfessionalism settlement. The hypothesis put forward in this paper in order to explain this silence from the Dutch side are based on the stake shifting between France and the Netherlands, at that time, concerning tolerance.     

Best for society? Transnational opposition to sexual and gender equalities in Canada and Great Britain

While much has been written about the limitations of new legislative equalities, there is a silence in geographies of sexualities regarding the backlash to these changes and the reiteration of particular heteronormativity. In working across Great Britain and Canada, we argue that these resistances are trans-scalar, operating transnationally as well as evoking nation, classroom, home and body. Arguments at the local level are embedded in and draw on the broader ‘natural family’ arguments circulating at local/regional, national and transnational levels. Drawing on the literature on transnationalism that understands these processes as (re)forming values and practices, this article explores the discourses that reiterate the naturalness and centrality of particular forms of heterosexuality as key for a healthy society and the protection of children. The latter works on three levels. First, the child cannot be ‘naturally’ produced outside of heterosexual sexual relations. Second, the raising of these children appropriately and healthily redefines ‘family’ within heteronormative structures. Third, comments that might be termed ‘homophobic’ are reframed as merely free speech as a way to counter LGBT recognition. We finish the article by arguing for explorations of heterosexuality within transnational networks to resistances to LGBT equalities.     

Magic,Memory & Mimesis—the “Power” of the Historical Moving Image to Possess?

In 1936 and 1937, Diana and Antoinette Powell-Cotton made a film that purported to show a healing practice involving possession. Over seventy years later, the film produced the start of a possession state in an audience from the same region in which the film was made. This paper uses the explanations given by those in the audience for this near possession to challenge some frequently cited thinking on the mimetic, magical power of film to possess. It offers an alternative approach to the viewing of archive film drawing on a form of mimesis rooted in habitual bodily memory. This mimetic relationship allows for an immanence of past in the present dependent on the past experience of the viewer rather than the power of the image.