Dear all, and in particular, to the organisers of the GSA conference in San Diego, CA, 

 

I read, with great consternation and dismay, the call for papers, entitled ‘The Aesthetics of Wartime Rape’. As a victim of sexual assault myself, and as someone who has known others who have suffered the same criminal violation, I cannot understand how so learned a group of people as academics could come up with a title (and indeed a call for papers) so thoughtless and repugnant.

 

Did it not occur to the organisers that the very title, rather than asking questions about literary representations, risks suggesting that rape itself (wartime or otherwise) is an act that could be discussed under the headings of beauty or taste? Did they at all consider the possibility that among their readers could be persons who might have suffered from the very crime they purport to ‘analyse'? If so, did they think such a title would merely pique their curiosity, or was it meant to be deliberately provocative? I shouldn’t like to speak for everyone — but it made me wince, angry with disbelief, and forced me to relive dark days and hours I rather would not.

 

Nor does the content of the call for papers redeem the title. Epithets such as ‘aesthetic strategies’ and ‘status of mass rape’ vie with words like ‘legacy’, as if this were as casual a subject as the use of alexandrines or dactylic pentameters in modern poetry.

 

I do not wish to deny that the subject itself — how art responds to such a violation of the self as rape — is worthy of study. It undoubtedly is. But it also calls for a degree of sensitivity and awareness that must exclude usual academic platitudes, and one where the weight and worth of every word used must matter. To have used the phrase ‘Aesthetics of Rape’, without further qualification, and without giving it further thought as to what it might imply, is an egregious error. That it comes from the pen of those very people whose lives are devoted to the study of words only compounds the error to the bounds of propriety.

 

When criticism presumes to pronounce on these matters, the critic has a duty to lay one’s cards on the table. I have laid mine. In fact, I would say more: if one asks whether art can and should ‘represent’ rape, and if one wants to judge whether such a representation is ‘adequate’ or otherwise, or speculate on what its ‘legacy’ might be, can those, who have never been victims themselves, ever be conferred the right to act as neutral arbitrators? Do they dare presume to know or understand what such an experience entails, that they then see it fit to judge whether an ‘aesthetic strategy’ used by a novelist in ‘dealing with’ rape ‘succeeds’?

 

One may, I know, argue that the freedom to pursue knowledge for its own sake, and the capacities afforded to us by art and imagination, gives us all the right to speak on any matter that concerns even the most distant from us, if we laid the right claim to the commonness that binds us all. But rape is an inhuman act, and neither ethics nor art can operate in a vacuum, away from the lives which gave birth to them, and which govern them. (The presumption that it does so, and the tendency to self-isolation perhaps partly explains the crises of confidence under which the humanities currently labours.) We rightly insist that there exists in art an important boundary between appropriation and misappropriation. Surely that boundary extends to criticism, to academic thought as well?

 

At a time when denying people platform for having the ‘wrong’ opinion, and when knowledge for its own sake, are both under sustained attack, I regret being forced to pen a message that might seem to take issue with an academic conference, whose province is, after all, thought. That said, the world of academia cannot afford to insulate itself from the lives of people any more than literature can, and in an area as inherently subjective as the humanities, it is those very lives that should matter the most. Both the conference, and the call for papers, betrays a degree of insensitivity that is not only problematic, but goes to the very foundations of what constitutes the humanities and what makes the study of it, and research in it, worthwhile.

 

I urge the organisers of the conference to reconsider the parameters of this conference as soon as possible, lest it hurt and offend (yet again) the very people whose lives the conference aims to further.

 

Sincerely yours,

Balaji.

 

 

 

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Date: Tue, 8 Dec 2015 19:45:48 +0000
From: Katie Stone <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: CFP (GSA): "The Aesthetics of Wartime Rape"

CALL FOR PAPERS for a panel on “The Aesthetics of Wartime Rape” at the
 40th Annual Conference of the German Studies Association (September 29 – October 2, 2016
 in San Diego, CA)


This panel invites papers exploring the wide range of responses to wartime rape in twenty-first-century German literature. The predicament of how to narrate (wartime) rape throws up a number of complex questions regarding the ethics of representation and the relationship between literature, politics, and ideology. Contributors might therefore address the following questions:


What aesthetic strategies have contemporary authors devised in order to describe, understand, and come to terms with mass rape and its legacy?
Do certain narrative modes bear particular ethical or political implications?
How do recent depictions relate to earlier narratives about wartime rape?
What do literary narratives about sexual violence in conflict zones tell us about the status of mass rape in contemporary memory cultures and also about attitudes to sexual violence more broadly?

Please send abstracts (250-350 words) to
 Katie Stone, Maynooth University ([log in to unmask]) by January 19, 2016. Please include your name, institutional affiliation, email address, and any audio-visual requirements for the presentation.

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