Frau Mata Hari on trial : seduction, espionage, and gendered abjection in reunifying Germany

Recently, the notion of gender has been employed as an epistemological and critical category in the study of transitional justice, reconciliation, and historical memory. Most of the relevant studies have been singular or comparative analyses of a predominantly empirical and/or socio-legal character.1 Also, in that context, important feminist contributions to these debates have discussed doing justice for sexual violence in post-war and/or post-conflict settings, with particular regard to the (inadequate) recognition of sexual violence as a strategy of war, and as a war crime in the Balkans, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and elsewhere.2 At the same time, however, so far there have been few attempts at theorizing gender as a modality of reconciliation and/or transitional justice,3 in contrast to, for instance, the ‘gender turn’ in the Holocaust studies.