A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Intergenerational Trauma in the Context of Political Violence

Abstract

Large-scale political and structural violence and social conflicts can inflict unique and long-lasting psychosocial trauma on women, which can be passed down across generations through biological pathways, family memory, and social structures. Based on the historical facts of the dictatorship of the Argentine military government and the genocide in Rwanda, combined with the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1820, this article uses a feminist research perspective to explore the gender characteristics of political trauma and the transmission logic of women’s intergenerational trauma. This paper analyzes international legal norms, regional reconciliation practices, and current practices of trauma recovery for women, analyzes the underlying reasons for the invisibility and marginalization of women’s trauma under the patriarchal system and political violence. Research has shown that political violence has a distinct gender orientation, with women being both the main victim group and the core carrier of intergenerational trauma; The existing institutional practice still faces challenges including the lack of historical narrative and insufficient implementation of rights protection. Only by facing up to the gender attributes of political trauma, establishing women’s narrative subjectivity and improving the institutional guarantee and healing system, can we block the intergenerational continuation of trauma and offer implications for promoting gender justice and ethnic reconciliation in post-conflict societies.