In the context of persisting yet ambiguous framings of
South African life as intrinsically violent especially for women, this
article aims at illuminating the relationship between gendered violence
and responsibility in two key works by J. M. Coetzee and their filmic
adaptations, which have until recently been the only existing remediations
of his oeuvre for the screen. The works in question are Coetzee’s early
novel In the Heart of the Country (1977), written at the height of the
apartheid era and set in the charged colonial space of a farm, and his later
success Disgrace (1999). The latter famously stirred a national controversy
because, in the early stage of the “new South Africa”, it dramatized the
violent gang rape of a white woman by three black men, alongside the
sexual exploitation of a ‘coloured’ girl by a powerful white professor.
Drawing on insights by Aaronette White, Veena Das, and Judith Butler,
responding in turn to the works of Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt, this
article explores the complexities and ambiguities of Coetzee’s take at
gendered violence in both its traditional and its innovative instances. If
on the one hand his approach seems intended at denouncing the persistent
subjugation of women in a (post)colonial, racialized, and classist context,
on the other it points to the possibility of a non-violent social practice
which implies staying aware of one’s inescapable vulnerability while
looking for a non-reciprocal agency in the social relations that make one
vulnerable.