Zainab Saeed El-mansi

Can the Raped Woman Speak? Zainab Saeed El-mansi

Rape has been known since the dawn of history; it has been a method by which women are subjugated to the power of men. This horrid experience has always been silenced for several reasons that will be investigated here. Literature has always been able to uncover what is barred from expression; hence, part of this book is dedicated to surveying the different literary presentation of this traumatic experience. What this book is basically concerned with is war rape because rape gains further connotations during war. Victimising women is intensified in the two main texts of concern here: Coetzee's Disgrace and Drakuli?'s S.: A Novel about the Balkans. Burdened with the pain of rape, raped women usually reside in silence in an attempt to hide what befell them; they either cannot speak or the listener is unwilling to listen, see, and understand the horror that they have gone through. The book here analyses the fictional representation of war rape and how far the writers collaborate with the patriarchal and the colonial ideologies to silence the women characters. This should be useful to researchers interested in literature, trauma studies, post-colonial feminism and gender studies.