Gendered Genocide: New Cambodian Cinema and the Case of Forced Marriage and Rape

The remarkable gendered renaissance of post-Khmer Rouge (KR) New Cambodian Cinema is evidenced in recent years through first- and second-generation post-traumatic films. Analyzing a prominent example (Lida Chan and Guillaume P. Suon’s Red Wedding, 2013), the Cambodian genocide is for the first time dealt with as a gendered genocide, breaking the taboo issue of forced marriage (a unique form of genocide in the world) and rape. A detailed analysis of Red Wedding describes how the meaning of forced marriage and rape is framed by both the cinema and the relevant national and international discourses embodied by the KR tribunal (also known as the ECCC) and the controversies its proceedings caused. The comparison between the cinematic testimony per se and that cinematic testimony transferred into legal testimony in court will reflect on the role of cinema in promoting women’s history. Furthermore, it raises highly controversial subjects, such as how to analyze the layers of gendered silencing surrounding both women’s traumatic history and women perpetrators of these sexual crimes; the influence of former KR cadres within current Cambodian society; and the necropolitical function of the killing fields as “truth spaces.” Female testimony, putting forth the necrophagic ethics, ultimately becomes the foundation of traumatic history. The conclusion suggests that these intense first-generation embodied memories resist remembering and instead continue to haunt the individual and the collective, thus proposing some reflections on the unique role of gendered cinema in healing post-traumatic society in a post-genocide era.

Morag, Raya (2020) “Gendered Genocide: New Cambodian Cinema and the Case of Forced Marriage and Rape,” Camera Obscura (103) 35.1:76-107.