5.19. Memories of Resistance: Women, Violence, and Survival Across Contexts [ES/EN]

This study examines the experiences developed in the project "Tongas of Memory: Pedagogies for Peace" project, led by human rights defender Virgelina Chará and implemented by the Malula Foundation in Colombia. The initiative, focused on social transformation through cultural and artistic practices, demonstrates how a community-based approach can generate sustainable impact by integrating collective healing, cultural preservation, economic empowerment, and historical memory. Using traditional techniques such as weaving, ancestral medicine, music, gastronomy, storytelling, and entrepreneurship, the project has involved over 60 participants, particularly from diverse groups including LGBTIQ+ communities, homeless individuals, indigenous people, Afro-Colombians, conflict victims, and especially women. This study analyzes the scalability and transformative potential of the memory tongas, focusing on their pedagogical methodology that connects personal trauma, cultural identity, and economic autonomy. To achieve it, semi-structured interviews have been developed, as well as participatory observation and immersive participatory observation by each of the team members in every of the activities developed in the project. Key questions include how community models can generate lasting social changes, and how artistic and cultural practices can serve as tools for collective healing and empowerment. This analysis seeks to provide insights into effective community responses that go beyond traditional approaches to social rehabilitation and peacebuilding.

This paper aims to contribute to the discussion on the rise of police violence and the repression of prostitution — with a focus on cisgender female prostitution — during the Brazilian Civil-Military Dictatorship (1964–1985). The control over dissident bodies in urban spaces and the erasure of these groups’ histories are fundamental issues that permeate urban history and continue to demand deeper investigation. This research is based on texts written by prostitutes and activists of the period, as well as newspapers and journalistic reports, in order to build a solid foundation of historical information and perspectives. The study adopts an urban analytical approach, examining prostitution spaces in the city center of São Paulo and their role in strategies of repression and resistance. Through this spatial reading, it seeks to understand how urban policies, police control, and moral discourses shaped the material and symbolic boundaries of the city. By analyzing the intersections between gender, space, and power, the study reveals how repression was articulated through the urban fabric and how marginalized groups resisted by reappropriating and redefining these territories. Ultimately, this work aims to contribute to understanding the institutionalization of gender-based violence during the dictatorship — particularly in relation to prostitution — while recognizing the persistence of stigmatization, violence, and the forms of resistance.

The work I propose presents the preliminary findings of my PhD research. In it, I seek to answer the question: “How are counter-memories of women victims of torture produced in the Basque Country?” The voices of women who were victims of politically motivated, state-perpetrated violence are largely absent from the dominant production of collective memories in the Basque Country. Basque collective memory primarily focuses on other victims, such as those of terrorism and various forms of violence rooted in Francoism. Hence, within the context of peacebuilding, it is necessary to reflect on how to create spaces that enable the inclusion of these absent voices. At the intersection of my migratory experience and feminist epistemologies, I seek to deepen my understanding of the methods through which I approach this question, such as narrative criminology and vulnerable listening. From a transdisciplinary framework—combining critical memory studies and feminist criminal law—I have come to recognize how migration itself has reshaped my knowledge production. I conducted in-depth interviews with key actors involved in memory processes in the Basque Country, particularly in relation to torture. This approach has proven challenging, especially due to the limitations in dialogue between the disciplines and the political actors involved. The conclusions have been analyzed from multiple perspectives. From socio-legal and memory studies standpoints, I have found almost no evidence of collective spaces for reflection on torture, which highlights the absence of these voices across all arenas. Therefore, I am navigating this path by acknowledging the existing context and attempting to offer, from the margins, a proposal to rethink the original question.

This presentation examines how the memories of Filipino survivors of the Japanese military sexual slavery system (“comfort women”) have been transmitted and maintained within the Philippines. It focuses on the efforts made to preserve these memories and the obstacles encountered, asking how memory activism can challenge the persistence of coloniality and sexism. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in both the Philippines and Japan—including observations of various local practices, analysis of archival and media materials, and engagement with survivor support groups—this study adopts a decolonial feminist perspective to explore how survivors’ voices have been reclaimed in the public sphere and how their struggles intersect with broader movements for gender and historical justice. While direct interviews with survivors remain challenging, the study relies extensively on publicly available testimonies, documents, and the activities of survivor support groups. Since the late 1980s, survivors and their supporters across the Philippines have sought not only state recognition and reparations but also the reconfiguration of historical narratives that have erased or marginalized their experiences. Their activism underscores the continuity of colonial power relations embedded in both national and global politics. At the same time, transnational networks of activism linking the Philippines and Japan have developed. In Japan, citizens, feminists, researchers, and artists have engaged in solidarity practices—supporting activities in the Philippines, conducting research, and organizing educational events and exhibitions—to confront Japan’s colonial and wartime past. This paper argues that memory activism functions as a form of the “socially connected model of responsibility,” enabling societies to contest state sponsored forgetting and to reimagine justice beyond the nation state framework. By framing memory as acts of solidarity, this study highlights the potential of transnational remembering to foster more inclusive and decolonial forms of democracy in East and Southeast Asia.