This year’s seminar in Cross Cultural Women’s and gender History addresses the relationship between gender and memory. Historians of women long ago turned to written and oral memories as a source for otherwise undocumented women’s experiences. More recently, historians of diverse interests have come to see memory itself, particularly collective memory, as a critical object of historical inquiry. That is to say, historians have come to regard memory as an active process of creating meaning, realizing that memory is not a “mirror” of what happened but is rather one of the things that happens. For how people remember the past, or the narratives that they create, sustain or challenge about the past, help to shape and justify their engagement with the present. From state efforts to memorialize national pasts into heroic or patriotic lessons that legitimize existing power structures, to multiple and contentious struggles over memory in the wake of violent conflicts, memory has played an important role in maintaining or overcoming structures of power, and historians have rightfully begun to direct their attention here.

Yet it is only recently that this new wave of scholarship has begun, in a sustained way, to question the relationship between memory and gender. From the differences in what and how men and women remember, to the ways in which memory serves to reinforce or critique gendered constructions, gender and memory are intimately connected. This seminar will roam widely across cultures and time periods to examine this new wave of literature on gender and memory. Some of the themes to be addressed within this theme include: the politics of race and gender; the relationship between knowledge and power; gendered violence and human rights; the role of domestic labor within various social and political regimes; and transnational constructions and reconstructions of cultural resistance.