Gender and Reparations: Seeking Transformative Justice

Abstract

Mass violations are gendered; from the ways in which harms are experienced by all subjects in gendered ways to how they are then understood or silenced in gendered ways. Feminist scholars and activists have critiqued the framing and granting of reparations, arguing that classical forms of compensation and restitution cannot reflect women’s experiences. This is, in part, due to the specific harms women suffer as well as the fact that many of the harms women face occur because of preexisting inequalities. Providing restitution for the individual harm but not addressing the structures of inequality which fostered or caused the harm means returning women to a position of discrimination and inequality and therefore, a situation in which women’s rights are still being violated. Thus, the challenge is how to repair victims as equal rights holders given the fact that some groups were not equal rights holders in the first place. Following this line of argument, restitution as a form of reparation risks not addressing core human rights concerns. While reparations and broader human rights adjudication work largely to address individual and familiar harms, there is also a need to balance these harms further with the need for societal change. In response to concerns around often returning people to situations of inequality through the way reparations are currently applied, there have been multiple calls for and attempts to implement more transformative forms of reparations, i.e. reparations which seek to address and subvert preexisting unequal and discriminatory structures. Section two of this chapter outlines some of these responses, focusing on transformative reparations both as an essential framing of reparations from a