Sexual violence, the fear of assaults and the silence evolving around this form of aggression has been determining women’s lives for centuries. Only recently, through social movements as Me Too or Ni Una Menos/Nem Uma A Menos, societies all over the world have been forced to acknowledge the omnipresence of sexual violence. Both female and male artists have been depicting sexual violence in literature, cinematography, visual arts and music since ancient times.

This project focuses on the representations of sexual violence against women in 21st century novels from Mexico, Brazil and South Africa through a feminist and postcolonial perspective. It aims to read rape not as an allegory of a territory’s or nation’s violation but to analyse the different subjectivities of female characters who suffer from sexual violence as well as the subjects of enunciation in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Cristina Rivera Garza’s Nadie me verá llorar (No One Will See Me Cry), Adriana Lisboa’s Sinfonia em branco (Symphony in White), Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story and Zakes Mda’s The Madonna of Excelsior. In these novels, the representations of rape and other forms of sexual violence range from implicit to explicit depictions of the women’s agonies, and the female victims’ places of enunciation vary, too, from “speaking bodies” to “enunciating silence”. Special attention is given to the unequal possibilities of enunciation for white and non-white women, resulting from colonialism’s hierarchical structures based on racist assumptions.

Ana Nenadovic is a doctoral fellow in literary studies at the Institute for Latin American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. Her research and teaching focus on gender studies and postcolonial studies, her main regions of interest are the Caribbean, Brazil and Southern Africa.