Download or read book Re writing Women as Victims written by María José Gámez Fuentes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-17 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume critically analyses political strategies, civil society initiatives and modes of representation that challenge the conventional narratives of women in contexts of violence. It deepens into the concepts of victimhood and agency that inform the current debate on women as victims. The volume opens the scope to explore initiatives that transcend the pair abuser–victim and explore the complex relations between gender and violence, and individual and collective accountability, through politics, activism and cultural productions in order to seek social transformation for gender justice. In innovative and interdisciplinary case studies, it brings attention to initiatives and narratives that make new spaces possible in which to name, self-identify, and resignify the female political subject as a social agent in situations of violence. The volume is global in scope, bringing together contributions ranging from India, Cambodia or Kenya, to Quebec, Bosnia or Spain. Different aspects of gender-based violence are analysed, from intimate relationships, sexual violence, military contexts, society and institutions. Re-writing Women as Victims: From Theory to Practice will be a key text for students, researchers and professionals in gender studies, political sciences, sociology and media and cultural Studies. Activists and policy makers will also find its practical approach and engagement with social transformation to be essential reading.

Download or read book No Visible Bruises written by Rachel Louise Snyder and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE HILLMAN PRIZE FOR BOOK JOURNALISM, THE HELEN BERNSTEIN BOOK AWARD, AND THE LUKAS WORK-IN-PROGRESS AWARD * A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOKS OF THE YEAR * NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST * LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FINALIST * ABA SILVER GAVEL AWARD FINALIST * KIRKUS PRIZE FINALIST NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2019 BY: Esquire, Amazon, Kirkus, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, BookPage, BookRiot, Economist, New York Times Staff Critics “A seminal and breathtaking account of why home is the most dangerous place to be a woman . . . A tour de force.” -Eve Ensler "Terrifying, courageous reportage from our internal war zone." -Andrew Solomon "Extraordinary." -New York Times ,“Editors' Choice” “Gut-wrenching, required reading.” -Esquire "Compulsively readable . . . It will save lives." -Washington Post “Essential, devastating reading.” -Cheryl Strayed, New York Times Book Review An award-winning journalist's intimate investigation of the true scope of domestic violence, revealing how the roots of America's most pressing social crises are buried in abuse that happens behind closed doors. We call it domestic violence. We call it private violence. Sometimes we call it intimate terrorism. But whatever we call it, we generally do not believe it has anything at all to do with us, despite the World Health Organization deeming it a “global epidemic.” In America, domestic violence accounts for 15 percent of all violent crime, and yet it remains locked in silence, even as its tendrils reach unseen into so many of our most pressing national issues, from our economy to our education system, from mass shootings to mass incarceration to #MeToo. We still have not taken the true measure of this problem. In No Visible Bruises, journalist Rachel Louise Snyder gives context for what we don't know we're seeing. She frames this urgent and immersive account of the scale of domestic violence in our country around key stories that explode the common myths-that if things were bad enough, victims would just leave; that a violent person cannot become nonviolent; that shelter is an adequate response; and most insidiously that violence inside the home is a private matter, sealed from the public sphere and disconnected from other forms of violence. Through the stories of victims, perpetrators, law enforcement, and reform movements from across the country, Snyder explores the real roots of private violence, its far-reaching consequences for society, and what it will take to truly address it.

Download or read book Any Man written by Amber Tamblyn and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An explosive, shapeshifting piece of literary real estate, Amber Tamblyn’s arresting debut offers a scathing portrait of American celebrity culture and the way in which it transmutes human tragedy into a vicious circus; victims are forgotten as likes and shares swirl, and ‘news’ becomes a squalid orgy, a lurid feast. Tamblyn takes every risk in this astonishing and innovative work, and succeeds, gloriously.” — Janet Fitch, bestselling author of The Revolution of Marina M. and Paint It Black Vanity Fair's Summer Ultimate Fiction List Entertainment Weekly Summer Preview List In this electric and provocative debut novel, Tamblyn blends genres of poetry, prose, and elements of suspense to give shape to the shocking narratives of victims of sexual violence, mapping the destructive ways in which our society perpetuates rape culture. A violent serial rapist is on the loose, who goes by the name Maude. She hunts for men at bars, online, at home— the place doesn’t matter, neither does the man. Her victims then must live the aftermath of their assault in the form of doubt from the police, feelings of shame alienation from their friends and family and the haunting of a horrible woman who becomes the phantom on which society projects its greatest fears, fascinations and even misogyny. All the while the police are without leads and the media hound the victims, publicly dissecting the details of their attack. What is extraordinary is how as years pass these men learn to heal, by banding together and finding a space to raise their voices. Told in alternating viewpoints signature to each voice and experience of the victim, these pages crackle with emotion, ranging from horror to breathtaking empathy. As bold as it is timely, Any Man paints a searing portrait of survival and is a tribute to those who have lived through the nightmare of sexual assault.

Download or read book Rid of My Disgrace written by Justin S. Holcomb and published by Crossway. This book was released on 2011 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Helps adult victims of sexual assault move from brokenness to healing. This book outlines a theology or redemption and includes an application of how the disgrace of the cross can lead victims toward grace.

Download or read book A Woman Is No Man written by Etaf Rum and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist for Best Fiction and Best Debut • BookBrowse's Best Book of the Year • A Marie Claire Best Women's Fiction of the Year • A Real Simple Best Book of the Year • A PopSugar Best Book of the Year • A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • A Washington Post 10 Books to Read in March • A Newsweek Best Book of the Summer • A USA Today Best Book of the Week • A Washington Book Review Difficult-To-Put-Down Novel • A Refinery 29 Best Books of the Month • A Buzzfeed News 4 Books We Couldn't Put Down Last Month • A New Arab Best Books by Arab Authors • An Electric Lit 20 Best Debuts of the First Half of 2019 • A The Millions Most Anticipated Books of the Year “Garnering justified comparisons to Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns... Etaf Rum’s debut novel is a must-read about women mustering up the bravery to follow their inner voice.” —Refinery 29 The New York Times bestseller and Read with Jenna TODAY SHOW Book Club pick telling the story of three generations of Palestinian-American women struggling to express their individual desires within the confines of their Arab culture in the wake of shocking intimate violence in their community. "Where I come from, we’ve learned to silence ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence will save us. Where I come from, we keep these stories to ourselves. To tell them to the outside world is unheard of—dangerous, the ultimate shame.” Palestine, 1990. Seventeen-year-old Isra prefers reading books to entertaining the suitors her father has chosen for her. Over the course of a week, the naïve and dreamy girl finds herself quickly betrothed and married, and is soon living in Brooklyn. There Isra struggles to adapt to the expectations of her oppressive mother-in-law Fareeda and strange new husband Adam, a pressure that intensifies as she begins to have children—four daughters instead of the sons Fareeda tells Isra she must bear. Brooklyn, 2008. Eighteen-year-old Deya, Isra’s oldest daughter, must meet with potential husbands at her grandmother Fareeda’s insistence, though her only desire is to go to college. Deya can’t help but wonder if her options would have been different had her parents survived the car crash that killed them when Deya was only eight. But her grandmother is firm on the matter: the only way to secure a worthy future for Deya is through marriage to the right man. But fate has a will of its own, and soon Deya will find herself on an unexpected path that leads her to shocking truths about her family—knowledge that will force her to question everything she thought she knew about her parents, the past, and her own future.

Download or read book What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape written by Sohaila Abdulali and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2018-11-27 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape is brilliant, frank, empowering, and urgently necessary. Sohaila Abdulali has created a powerful tool for examining rape culture and language on the individual, societal, and global level that everyone can benefit from reading." —Jill Soloway In the tradition of Rebecca Solnit, a beautifully written, deeply intelligent, searingly honest—and ultimately hopeful—examination of sexual assault and the global discourse on rape told through the perspective of a survivor, writer, counselor, and activist After surviving gang-rape at seventeen in Mumbai, Sohaila Abdulali was indignant about the deafening silence that followed and wrote a fiery piece about the perception of rape—and rape victims—for a women's magazine. Thirty years later, with no notice, her article reappeared and went viral in the wake of the 2012 fatal gang-rape in New Delhi, prompting her to write a New York Times op-ed about healing from rape that was widely circulated. Now, Abdulali has written What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape—a thoughtful, generous, unflinching look at rape and rape culture. Drawing on her own experience, her work with hundreds of survivors as the head of a rape crisis center in Boston, and three decades of grappling with rape as a feminist intellectual and writer, Abdulali tackles some of our thorniest questions about rape, articulating the confounding way we account for who gets raped and why—and asking how we want to raise the next generation. In interviews with survivors from around the world we hear moving personal accounts of hard-earned strength, humor, and wisdom that collectively tell the larger story of what rape means and how healing can occur. Abdulali also points to the questions we don't talk about: Is rape always a life-definining event? Is one rape worse than another? Is a world without rape possible? What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape is a book for this #MeToo and #TimesUp age that will stay with readers—men and women alike—for a long, long time.

Download or read book Wake Siren written by Nina MacLaughlin and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In fierce, textured voices, the women of Ovid's Metamorphoses claim their stories and challenge the power of myth I am the home of this story. After thousands of years of other people’s tellings, of all these different bridges, of words gotten wrong, I’ll tell it myself. Seductresses and she-monsters, nymphs and demi-goddesses, populate the famous myths of Ovid's Metamorphoses. But what happens when the story of the chase comes in the voice of the woman fleeing her rape? When the beloved coolly returns the seducer's gaze? When tales of monstrous transfiguration are sung by those transformed? In voices both mythic and modern, Wake, Siren revisits each account of love, loss, rape, revenge, and change. It lays bare the violence that undergirds and lurks in the heart of Ovid’s narratives, stories that helped build and perpetuate the distorted portrayal of women across centuries of art and literature. Drawing on the rhythms of epic poetry and alt rock, of everyday speech and folk song, of fireside whisperings and therapy sessions, Nina MacLaughlin, the acclaimed author of Hammer Head, recovers what is lost when the stories of women are told and translated by men. She breathes new life into these fraught and well-loved myths.

Download or read book I Never Called It Rape written by Robin Warshaw and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new edition of the 1988 classic text that exposed the extreme prevalence of rape in America, coining the term acquaintance rape and establishing the disturbing statistics on sexual assault that still hold just as true today—now featuring an original preface from Gloria Steinem, a new introduction by Salamishah Tillet, an updated afterword by Mary P. Koss, PH.D., as well as an updated resources section. “Essential. . . . It is nonpolemical, lucid, and speaks eloquently not only to the victims of acquaintance rape but to all those caught in its net.”— Philadelphia Inquirer In 1988, Robin Warshaw wrote I Never Called It Rape, the ground-breaking book that revealed a staggering truth: 25% of women were the victims of rape or attempted rape. Over 80% of these women knew their assailants. Warhsaw based her reportage on the first large-scale study into rape ever, conducted by Ms. Magazine in the late 80s. Thirty years later, we now have a wealth of statistics on rape. The disturbing truth is that the figures have not diminished. That our culture enables rape is not just shown by the numbers—the outbreak of allegations against serial rapists from Bill Cosby to Harvey Weinstein and the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump, a man who was recorded bragging about sexual assault, have further amplified this horrifying truth. With over 80,000 copies sold to date, I Never Called It Rape has served as a guide to understanding rape as a cultural phenomenon for tens of thousands—providing women and men with strategies to address our rape endemic; survivors with the context and resources to help them heal from their experiences; and pulling the wool from all our eyes on the pervasiveness of rape and sexual assault today. As relevant today as when it was first published, this new edition features Warshaw’s original report and her 1994 Introduction, as well as an original Preface from Gloria Steinem, a new Introduction by Salamishah Tillet on how the cultural landscape has evolved since the 1980s, an updated Afterword by Mary P. Koss, PH.D., examining the ways she would approach the research she did for Ms. differently today, as well as an updated resources section.

Download or read book Gender and Violence in Haiti written by Benedetta Faedi Duramy and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-22 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women in Haiti are frequent victims of sexual violence and armed assault. Yet an astonishing proportion of these victims also act as perpetrators of violent crime, often as part of armed groups. Award-winning legal scholar Benedetta Faedi Duramy visited Haiti to discover what causes these women to act in such destructive ways and what might be done to stop this tragic cycle of violence. Gender and Violence in Haiti is the product of more than a year of extensive firsthand observations and interviews with the women who have been caught up in the widespread violence plaguing Haiti. Drawing from the experiences of a diverse group of Haitian women, Faedi Duramy finds that both the victims and perpetrators of violence share a common sense of anger and desperation. Untangling the many factors that cause these women to commit violence, from self-defense to revenge, she identifies concrete measures that can lead them to feel vindicated and protected by their communities. Faedi Duramy vividly conveys the horrifying conditions pervading Haiti, even before the 2010 earthquake. But Gender and Violence in Haiti also carries a message of hope—and shows what local authorities and international relief agencies can do to help the women of Haiti.

Download or read book Savage Appetites written by Rachel Monroe and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “necessary and brilliant” (NPR) exploration of our cultural fascination with true crime told through four “enthralling” (The New York Times Book Review) narratives of obsession. In Savage Appetites, Rachel Monroe links four criminal roles—Detective, Victim, Defender, and Killer—to four true stories about women driven by obsession. From a frustrated and brilliant heiress crafting crime-scene dollhouses to a young woman who became part of a Manson victim’s family, from a landscape architect in love with a convicted murderer to a Columbine fangirl who planned her own mass shooting, these women are alternately mesmerizing, horrifying, and sympathetic. A revealing study of women’s complicated relationship with true crime and the fear and desire it can inspire, together these stories provide a window into why many women are drawn to crime narratives—even as they also recoil from them. Monroe uses these four cases to trace the history of American crime through the growth of forensic science, the evolving role of victims, the Satanic Panic, the rise of online detectives, and the long shadow of the Columbine shooting. Combining personal narrative, reportage, and a sociological examination of violence and media in the 20th and 21st centuries, Savage Appetites is a “corrective to the genre it interrogates” (The New Statesman), scrupulously exploring empathy, justice, and the persistent appeal of crime.

Download or read book Surviving Sexual Violence written by Liz Kelly and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-26 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women's awareness of the threat and reality of sexual violence is now perhaps more than ever publicly acknowledged. Yet this fact continues to be almost wholly ignored. This new study, based on in-depth interviews with 60 women, is the first to cover the experience of a range of forms of sexual violence over women's lifetimes. Drawing on feminist theory, developing a critique of male research and quoting extensively from the women interviewed, it developes feminist thought in several key areas: the similarities and differences between forms of sexual violence; the ways women define their experiences; and the strategies women use in resisting, coping with and surviving sexual violence. The author stresses the importance for all women of recognizing the incidents of sexual violence in their lives and seeing themselves and other women as survivors rather than victims. In highlighting the ways in which the media, the criminal justice system and even the "helping" profess ions contribute to the trivialization of sexual violence, she demonstrates the necessity of women organizing collectively to end this suffering.

Download or read book Queering Sexual Violence written by Jennifer Patterson and published by Riverdale Avenue Books LLC. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Often pushed to the margins, queer, transgender and gender non-conforming survivors have been organizing in anti-violence work since the birth of the movement. Queering Sexual Violence: Radical Voices from Within the Anti-Violence Movement locates them at the center of the anti-violence movement and creates a space for their voices to be heard. Moving beyond dominant narratives and the traditional “violence against women” framework, the book is multi-gendered, multi-racial and multi-layered. This thirty-seven piece collection disrupts the mainstream conversations about sexual violence and connects them to disability justice, sex worker rights, healing justice, racial justice, gender self-determination, queer & trans liberation and prison industrial complex abolition through reflections, personal narrative, and strategies for resistance and healing. Where systems, institutions, families, communities and partners have failed them, this collection lifts them up, honors a multitude of lived experiences and shares the radical work that is being done outside mainstream anti-violence and the non-profit industrial complex.

Download or read book Recollections of My Nonexistence written by Rebecca Solnit and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An electric portrait of the artist as a young woman that asks how a writer finds her voice in a society that prefers women to be silent In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. She tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city that became her great teacher; of the small apartment that, when she was nineteen, became the home in which she transformed herself; of how punk rock gave form and voice to her own fury and explosive energy. Solnit recounts how she came to recognize the epidemic of violence against women around her, the street harassment that unsettled her, the trauma that changed her, and the authority figures who routinely disdained and disbelieved girls and women, including her. Looking back, she sees all these as consequences of the voicelessness that was and still is the ordinary condition of women, and how she contended with that while becoming a writer and a public voice for women's rights. She explores the forces that liberated her as a person and as a writer--books themselves, the gay men around her who offered other visions of what gender, family, and joy could be, and her eventual arrival in the spacious landscapes and overlooked conflicts of the American West. These influences taught her how to write in the way she has ever since, and gave her a voice that has resonated with and empowered many others.

Download or read book Hill Women written by Cassie Chambers and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After rising from poverty to earn two Ivy League degrees, an Appalachian lawyer pays tribute to the strong “hill women” who raised and inspired her, and whose values have the potential to rejuvenate a struggling region. “Destined to be compared to Hillbilly Elegy and Educated.”—BookPage (starred review) “A gritty, warm love letter to Appalachian communities and the resourceful women who lead them.”—Slate Nestled in the Appalachian mountains, Owsley County, Kentucky, is one of the poorest places in the country. Buildings are crumbling as tobacco farming and coal mining decline. But strong women find creative ways to subsist in the hills. Through the women who raised her, Cassie Chambers traces her path out of and back into the Kentucky mountains. Chambers’s Granny was a child bride who rose before dawn every morning to raise seven children. Granny’s daughter, Ruth—the hardest-working tobacco farmer in the county—stayed on the family farm, while Wilma—the sixth child—became the first in the family to graduate from high school. Married at nineteen and pregnant with Cassie a few months later, Wilma beat the odds to finish college. She raised her daughter to think she could move mountains, like the ones that kept her safe but also isolated from the larger world. Cassie would spend much of her childhood with Granny and Ruth in the hills of Owsley County. With her “hill women” values guiding her, she went on to graduate from Harvard Law. But while the Ivy League gave her opportunities, its privileged world felt far from her reality, and she moved home to help rural Kentucky women by providing free legal services. Appalachian women face issues from domestic violence to the opioid crisis, but they are also keeping their towns together in the face of a system that continually fails them. With nuance and heart, Chambers breaks down the myth of the hillbilly and illuminates a region whose poor communities, especially women, can lead it into the future.

Download or read book Radicalizing Her written by Nimmi Gowrinathan and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An urgent corrective to the erasure of the female fighter from narratives on gender and power, demanding that we see all women as political actors. “Violence, for me, and for the women I chronicle in this book, is simply a political reality.” Though the female fighter is often seen as an anomaly, women make up nearly 30% of militant movements worldwide. Historically, these women—viewed as victims, weak-willed wives, and prey to Stockholm Syndrome—have been deeply misunderstood. Radicalizing Her holds the female fighter up in all her complexity as a kind of mirror to contemporary conversations on gender, violence, and power. The narratives at the heart of the book are centered in the Global South, and extend to a criticism of the West’s response to the female fighter, revealing the arrayed forces that have driven women into battle and the personal and political elements of these decisions. Gowrinathan, whose own family history is intertwined with resistance, spent nearly twenty years in conversation with female fighters in Sri Lanka, Eritrea, Pakistan, and Colombia. The intensity of these interactions consistently unsettled her assumptions about violence, re-positioning how these women were positioned in relation to power. Gowrinathan posits that the erasure of the female fighter from narratives on gender and power is not only dangerous but also, anti-feminist. She argues for a deeper, more nuanced understanding of women who choose violence noting in particular the tendency of contemporary political discourse to parse the world into for—and against—camps: an understanding of motivations to fight is read as condoning violence, and oppressive agendas are given the upper hand by the moral imperative to condemn it. Coming at a political moment that demands an urgent re-imagining of the possibilities for women to resist, Radicalizing Her reclaims women’s roles in political struggles on the battlefield and in the streets.

Download or read book Rewriting Reprising written by Georges Letissier and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-10-02 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume comprises sixteen essays, preceded by an introductory chapter focusing on the diverse modalities of textual, and more widely, artistic transfer. Whereas the first Rewriting-Reprising volume (coord. by C. Maisonnat, J. Paccaud-Huguet & A. Ramel) underscored the crucial issue of origins, the second purports to address the specificities of hypertextual, and hyperartistic (Genette, 1982) practices. Its common denominator is therefore second degree literature and art. A first section, titled “Pastiche, Parody, Genre and Gender,” delineates what amounts to a poetics of rewriting/reprising, by investigating a whole range of authorial stances, from homage – through a symphonic play of intertexts – to varying degrees of textual deviance, or dissidence. Some genres, like the fairy tale or the Gothic, through their very malleability, are indeed more apt to lend themselves to rewriting/reprising. However, hypertextuality is not merely ornamental, or purely aesthetic; its subversive potential is perceptible notably through its many attempts at emancipating the genre from the ideological fetters of gender. Over the past two decades, Victorian literature and culture has become an inescapable field of investigations to any study on intertextuality in the English-speaking world. In a second part, diversity has been preferred to any single, specific angle to approach the Victorian/neo-Victorian tropism. The purpose is to provide as complete a spectrum as is reasonably possible in such a volume. The practice of rewriting in the Victorian age is thus studied alongside contemporary appropriations of the Victorian canon. The question is raised of whether literary fetishism may not result in a form of counterfeit classicism, while the more challenging neo-Victorian rewritings would make a claim for the need to choose one’s literary heritage and ancestors. This is where the post-colonial agenda comes in. Precisely, the third part investigates the question of rewriting-reprising as a way of writing back. The myth of Frankenstein’s creature bent on wreaking vengeance on his creator is of course seminal as it offers a myth of transgression which, in its turn, becomes a “foundation myth.” Not only are post-colonial responses to their (disclaimed) parent-texts highly theory-informed, but they also evince an awareness of such contemporary issues which are direct consequences of the colonial past. In the last section of this volume, the scope of what comes within the range of intertextuality per se is widened to cover artistic dialogism. In the exchanges between theatrical texts, reprise may be construed as a metaphor standing for the pleasure inherent in the process of recreation. The interaction between embedded paintings and the embedding canvas offers yet another variation on the reprise motif, as does the meta-aesthetic discourse of the critic on the work of art. What begins as mere repetition is soon colored by the personal inflections of the interpreter. In operatic performances, updating a classical text to make it suitable to contemporary audiences, and in close harmony with the role assigned to music, is liable to spur on the creativity of recreation.

Download or read book Writing the Survivor written by Robin E. Field and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction identifies a new genre of American fiction, the rape novel, that recenters narratives of sexual violence on the survivors of violence and abuse, rather than the perpetrators. The rape novel arose during the women’s liberation movement as women writers collectively challenged the traditional erasure of female subjectivity and agency found in earlier representations of sexual violence in American fiction. The rape novel not only foregrounds survivors and their stories in a textual centering that affirms their dignity and self-worth, but also develops new narratological strategies for portraying violent, disturbing subject matter. In bringing together many key women’s texts of the last decades of the 20th century, the rape novel demonstrates the centrality of sexual assault to women’s fiction of this era. The rape novels of the 21st century continue the political activism inherent in the genre—educating readers, offering community to survivors, and encouraging social activism—as the stories of male survivors are increasingly told. A radical reconsideration of late twentieth-century American novels, Writing the Survivor underscores the importance of women’s activism upon the novel’s form and content and reveals the portrayal of rape as rape to be an interethnic imperative.