| dc.description.abstract | Her-stories or women’s stories of the war connote historical notes and experiences told from a feminine perspective related to the war that construct, preserve, and present the memory and atrocities of war as an instrument in the human rights discourse. While the militarized-masculine grand narrative overshadows the herstories from the history of the war, as the on-going discussions would attest, these herstories recount eyewitness accounts, resiliency, courage, and hope from a gender perspective in addition to reflecting on her victimization and the anguish of the past. This research contextualizes this main approach of the herstories of war to Sri Lanka where a 26-years long civil war concluded in 2009. Based on this context, this research employs Herstories digital archive (2012-2013) that documents the experiences of women who lived in the conflict areas during the Sri Lankan civil war from a feminist perspective using the victim-narrative lens by coining a theory; herstory-narrative. Using thematic narrative analysis, this research analyses the selected women’s letter-stories from the Herstories archive and discusses the aspects of pathetic-victimhood such asthe displacement, and gendered witnessing related to loss of loved ones due to the war. This is a crucial analytical approach in the post-war context along with their troubled-knowledge vital to human rights discourse. The narrative troubled-knowledge specific to Herstories are therefore coined as ‘Feminist troubled knowledge’ referring to the war-stories. | |