Pascha Bueno-Hansen's book tackles a crucial and sensitive issue in Peru and beyond: the limits of international human rights law in addressing cases of gendered and sexual violence in postconflict societies. Bueno-Hansen offers an exciting approach to thinking through the challenges of human rights law, calling for a decolonial, feminist, and intersectional engagement with transitional justice efforts. Her book offers a significant contribution to scholarship on political violence, memory, and human rights.
Bueno-Hansen attempts to expand the framework of transitional justice in Peru (and beyond) by engaging the centrality and contemporary force of coloniality. Her book seeks to “underscore the paradoxical character” of international human rights law (3). She says that while human rights law is mobilized in well-meaning ways to defend rights, these efforts often lead to “erasure and silencing.” She asks, “Who is visible as a subject under the human rights optic?” and “What types of violence remain unaddressed?” (3). For Bueno-Hansen, gender-based violence is an important entry point for thinking about these questions. A decolonial and intersectional feminist approach, she argues, allows us to see that gender-based violence cannot be understood apart from its racial, economic, and historical context. In part, she argues, this means expanding our understanding of gender-based violence beyond sexual violence.
In order to accomplish her goal of critically contextualizing gender-based violence and international human rights approaches to transitional justice, Bueno-Hansen investigates the human rights and feminist movements that developed during the most recent period of political violence in Peru (1980–2000). She offers important critiques of the limitations of both, in particular due to blind spots around race and coloniality (chapter 1). The author also offers a critical engagement with the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission's (PTRC) mission and approach (chapters 2 and 3) and the particular impacts of these on indigenous women who agreed to testify for the PTRC. She then moves on to push readers to rethink categorizations of female victims of sexual violence as “rape victims” and interrogates the particular place of children born of rape in postconflict societies (chapter 4).
Together, these chapters offer tremendous detail. And yet, I found myself wanting the discussion of these important topics grounded in campesina voices. We hear from PTRC commissioners, from human rights and women's rights leaders, from scholars and public intellectuals, but—with the exception of some testimony transcripts—the voices of indigenous and campesina women are absent until the end of chapter 3 and are generally lacking throughout the book. This is striking since so much of what Bueno-Hansen is trying to do is call attention to the silencing and erasure of certain voices and bodies; even so, she seems to reproduce this same problem in her own work. I found the book's opening, for instance, to be problematic for this reason. The author begins by recalling an encounter at the office of a human rights attorney with a campesina woman who had continued to look for a daughter taken during the war, despite knowing she was likely dead. Bueno-Hansen has chosen to refer to this campesina woman pseudonymously as Rosa Cuchillo (to whom the book is also dedicated), the titular character in a public theater piece performed by Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, a Peruvian political theater group that was and continues to be centrally involved in struggles for memory and peace in Peru. Despite her claim that this particular woman “cannot be reduced to a statistic of families of the disappeared” (4), Bueno-Hansen's use of this pseudonym risks making her story virtually interchangeable with that of all the other mothers who lost a child during this period and reducing her just the same.
The book's striking lack of indigenous voices, as well as ethnographic grounding, is evident again in chapter 5, a study of the feminist nongovernmental organization The Study and Defense of Women's Rights (DEMUS) and their work focused on gendered violence in the highland community of Manta. In concentrating on the lessons DEMUS learned about gendered assumptions about indigenous and campesina women and the challenges of doing intercultural work, Bueno-Hansen privileges the voices of the women in this organization. The author notes that she conducted months of fieldwork with this organization, so I wondered, where is the ethnographic reflection indicative of this fieldwork? Where are the exchanges, interactions, conversations with members of the community? In the book's conclusion, we learn that Manta's general assembly expelled DEMUS from the community. This comes as quite a surprise given that Bueno-Hansen had praised the nongovernmental organization for its work with the community, and especially its attempt to learn from and challenge its own assumptions and insensitivities. The lack of serious discussion about the reasons behind the expulsion, and the absence of non-NGO voices addressing this issue, raises questions about a book that aims to address silence and erasure: what about the indigenous women with whom DEMUS worked? The community of Manta? The families impacted by this violence? It would have been important to hear from those men, women, and children in addition to the more privileged feminists and human rights workers from Lima.
Bueno-Hansen does important work in illustrating the significance of colonial patterns and alternative temporalities that challenge current human rights work (e.g., discussion of el patrón in chapter 4), and as such Feminist and Human Rights Struggles in Peru is an important addition to the scholarship on gender and transitional justice. However, she could have done more to engage with the work of other decolonial feminist scholars who also try to explore the limits of the “rights” framework (such as Blackwell Reference Blackwell, Speed, Castillo and Stephen2006, Reference Blackwell2011; Hernández Castillo Reference Hernández Castillo2016; Speed Reference Speed2007; and Speed, Hernández Castillo, and Stephen Reference Speed, Castillo and Stephen2006) and those who make clear links between gender, sexual violence, and coloniality (such as Smith Reference Smith2015 and Theidon Reference Theidon2012). Along these lines, the analytical treatment of the category of gender was somewhat problematic. While the author is clearly aware that gender does not equate to women, the writing and approach seem to do just that. I wondered where discussions about sexuality, violence against LGBTQ communities, or the feminization of indigenous men, for instance, were. And finally, to understand the Peruvian case (and perhaps others), Feminist and Human Rights Struggles in Peru would be best read next to other more nuanced and ethnographic accounts, such as Kimberly Theidon's (Reference Theidon2012) Intimate Enemies, or Alejandra Ballón's (Reference Ballón2014) Memorias del Caso Peruano de Esterilización Forzada.
