‘Like a Dog’: Rituals of Animal Degradation in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Abu Ghraib Prison

Reading and writing: Narrative motifs of sexual and epistemic violence in Waiting for the Barbarians

“…She traces parallels between the practices of violence in the novel and those reported from Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 during the war in Iraq. According to Olson, sexual violence in Disgrace represents “[t]he patriarchal violence that informed apartheid South Africa and the post‐apartheid moment” and simultaneously opens a space for the reader to contemplate “the feminization, animalization, and torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib” (, p. 128). Olson's approach is to conjoin violence in Disgrace and the atrocities perpetrated in Abu Ghraib prison so that each illuminates the other.…”