Theorizing Otherwise: Sites of Conscience and Gendered Violence

Abstract

This article starts with the idea that a site of conscience is uniquely capable of keeping alive in the public imagination—as an open wound and as a call to action—the devastating persistence of gendered violence. It doesn’t seek to offer an account of how such a site might come to be imagined, let alone come into being. Instead, its focus is on the conceptual work required to make space for this kind of imagining. I argue that it is important to make and maintain a distinction between a site of memory and a site of conscience and that the category of time needs to be denaturalized and reconsidered in our conceptualization of the cultural work performed by sites of conscience.