Rape, Representation, and the Endurance of Hegemonic Masculinity

Abstract

This article mines the history of rape jurisprudence to illuminate how the legal treatment of wartime rape informs long-standing gendered tropes that dominate its understanding on the ground as well as its representation in literary and cultural texts. The essay concludes by reading Congolese novelist Emmanuel Dongala’s Johnny Mad Dog as a model for a dialogic literary imagination capable of revealing the fatal consequences of toxic masculinity as it informs not only the perpetration of rape in wartime, but also the possibility for either perpetrator or victim to achieve subjectivity free from the burdens of brutally constraining gender norms.

Between Trauma and Resilience

“…Conversations in the public arena tend to place the emphasis on what Elizabeth Swanson calls the "cultural signifi cance of silence and voice," which is placed in "complex dialogue with the individual and psychological ones," instigating a collective as well as an individual questioning of the trope of "unspeakability" itself. 64 It was clear to Takševa in her conversations with Bosnian women survivors that for all of them, in Swanson's words, the "reclamation of voice is also a gesture toward building subjectivities profoundly damaged in the foundational act and cultural consequences of wartime rape." 65 The narratives from which we draw were collected in the form of open-ended, semistructured qualitative "life history interviews" 66 in 2017 in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina during a month-long stay.…”