Citation

Silber IC. Gend. Hist. 2004; 16(3): 561-587.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2004, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.0953-5233.2004.00356.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This article explores post-war El Salvador as characterised by disillusionment in the nation's neoliberal rebuilding project. A key part of my argument is that this disillusion-ment is gendered. Specifically, I focus on a spectrum of gendered experiences and responses to social and inter-personal violence in El Salvador's recent history. Is there a relationship between wartime political violence, continued processes of exclusion (i.e. education, healthcare, housing), and post-war waves of domestic violence, youth violence and ‘random’ violence? While some scholars posit questions regarding Salvadoran toler-ance to violence through time, I tackle this question by focusing on emerging criticisms of El Salvador's post-war reconciliation. I privilege a focus on the everyday and people's ambiguities as they deal with political change and a neoliberal economy that marginalises the rural sector. In particular, I argue for placing many rural women's stories of gender-based violence, their assertions of an embodied vulnerability and daily insecurity, within a political economic understanding of the contradictions of El Salvador's peace and nation-building project. Through a series of ethnographic examples based on seventeen months of research in a former warzone, I suggest that a daily and gendered violence is rendered invisible. My aim is to theorise a range of women's and men's losses and to impart the urgency of their narratives that problematise assumptions of what constitutes pain, sorrow and the challenges of war-torn life. This is an attempt to write outside privileged texts that ask subaltern women to speak in a collective voice and articulate their past loss and future hopes. In doing so, I discuss methodology and historicise my own fraught positioning as an international witness/researcher at a very particular moment of El Salvador's transition to democracy.