Dear colleagues,
For info.
Best wishes,
Emily
Dr Emily Jeremiah
Senior Lecturer in German, Director of German
Admissions Tutor, SMLLC
School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures
Royal Holloway, University of London
Egham
TW20 0EX
UK
OFFICE HOURS: Tuesday 15-16; Thursday 13.30-14.30, IN103
+44 (0)1784 443256
http://tinyurl.com/ejeremiah
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A reminder of the next CCWW cross-cultural seminar. See below for travel bursaries for PhD students for this event (deadline for applications 20 October)
Friday 20 November 2015, 2pm, Senate House, University of London
Women Writing Rape: Problematic Depictions and Critical Challenges - CCWW Cross-Cultural Seminar
If the challenge for second-wave feminists was to make sexual violence visible, then today we are faced with the opposite problem: the proliferation of discourses about rape. While rape narratives may be empowering, therapeutic, or challenge taboos, in popular culture they often assume more worrying contours. The mass media offers countless examples of the ways in which sexual violence continues to be sensationalized and naturalized in twenty-first-century culture. Through the prism of women’s writing and film, this seminar will open up cross-cultural perspectives on some of the most problematic dimensions of contemporary discourse on sexual violence.
Feminist critics have traditionally viewed art by women as a site of resistance within a ‘rape culture’ understood to normalize sexual aggression against women (Higgins and Silver, Rape and Representation, 1991; Gunne and Brigley Thompson, Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives, 2010). Under this reading, literature by women has the potential to subvert patriarchal rape scripts, by empowering women to articulate their experiences, for example, or by challenging conventional wisdom about victims and perpetrators. It is equally important to analyse and understand the flipside of this inspiring and subversive literature: cultural works by women that reproduce problematic assumptions about sexual violence. On the formal level, we might consider the ways female authors reproduce the male gaze in their depictions of rape. What does their writing therefore reveal about the fine balance between making rape visible and sensationalizing or eroticizing sexual violence? Thematically, to what extent do literary works by women reproduce what Sharon Marcus (‘Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words’, 1992) calls the ‘rape script’ or ‘language of rape’ that defines women as inherently violable? How, then, do we approach literary works by women that reproduce a myth of ideal victims (powerless, virtuous and blameless) and perpetrators (deviant strangers)?
The point of this seminar is not to propagate a normative ethics of representation, but to discuss how we respond as readers and position ourselves as critics in relation to texts whose representations we may find troublesome. Contributions will explore our responsibility as reader or critic to fill in the ethical gaps of a given narrative, by rendering visible assumptions that might be naturalised by the rhetorical strategies of the text. Papers will consider what problematic representations of rape reveal about our collective thinking. The concluding discussion will evaluate the possibilities and limitations of women’s writing for illuminating and challenging the sexual and textual politics of rape in the twenty-first century.
PROGRAMME
Panel 1:
Katie Stone (German, Maynooth University): Writing Rape, Troping History: Julia Franck’s The Blind Side of the Heart (Die Mittagsfrau, 2007) and Back to Back (Rücken an Rücken, 2011)
Anna Kingsley (Hispanic Studies, Royal Holloway): Rape On-Screen and the Ethics of Looking in the Mexican Film El Traspatio (Backyard, 2009)
Panel 2:
Nicole Fayard (French, Leicester University): Shifting the Gaze, Shifting the Blame in French Rape Narrative?
Poonkulaly Gunaseelan (Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies, SOAS): Conjugal Spaces, Societal reflections: questioning and/or representing sexual violence in Shashi Deshpande’s_The Dark Holds No Terrors and ‘A Liberated Woman'
All welcome - please contact [log in to unmask] if you wish to attend.
N.B.
With thanks to the Cassal Trust, some PhD student travel bursaries are available for attendance at this seminar. To apply, please email [log in to unmask] with your institutional affiliation, name of supervisor, and estimated travel costs (cheapest possible) by 20 October 2015.
Abstracts and all details are available at:
http://events.sas.ac.uk/imlr/events/view/18430/Women+Writing+Rape%3A+Problematic+Depictions+and+Critical+Challenges
Professor Emerita Gill Rye,
Director, Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing,
Institute of Modern Languages Research,
School of Advanced Study,
University of London,
Senate House,
Malet Street,
London WC1E 7HU,
U.K.
[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
http://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/centre-study-contemporary-womens-writing
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