ABSTRACT
The events of the 1994 Rwandan genocide are globally recognized as tragic and important, while the 1972 Burundi genocide continues to be generally ignored or, if acknowledged at all, is characterized as a civil war. Both events not only share similarities in their cultural and political dynamics, but they presented many of the same methods of execution and militarization. In both cases, men and boys were the explicit targets of the genocide, leaving girls and women as secondary casualties. How gender plays out in these events remains under-theorized if not completely ignored. I focus on how these mass killings specifically targeted men and, as a result, produced a population of largely women survivors. By focusing on the testimony and narratives of women survivors, I reframe the ways in which we think about the political limits of memory, commemoration, and reconciliation within both a colonial and gendered context. Not only are the women survivors of the Rwandan genocide produced as a casualty of warfare, but they also undergo production as accomplices to genocide. Focusing on the survivors’ accounts allows new hermeneutic questions emerge and new decolonial frameworks can be advanced as resistance to cultural forms of genocide that persist well after the event.
