Mattering Bodies: Women and Corporeal Violence in Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee and Their Filmic Adaptations

Against a backdrop of increasing academic interest in the pervasiveness and mutability of violence in African contexts, this paper explores how violence on women’s bodies, including punitive rape, partners’ violence, invasive state surveillance and medicalization, is dramatized in works by the South African authors Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee, and in their filmic adaptations. While Gordimer’s short stories "City Lovers" and "Country Lovers" (both 1974) are mostly concerned with the corporeal transformations women undergo because of simultaneous race, class and gender violence, Coeztee’s post-apartheid "Disgrace" (1999) more explicitly interrogates the possibilities of undermining violence through corporeal resistance to documentation, medicalization and displacement. Drawing on a Deleuzian notion of the body as a relational and ever-changing ‘assemblage’, I contend that a comparison between these literary texts and their filmic adaptations, rather than leading to a sterile debate on trans-media ‘fidelity’, allows a further, deeper understanding of women’s violated corporealities: one which entails moving beyond the pervasive idea of violence as an inevitable facet of (South) African societies, and pushes us towards a vision of violated bodies as always self-inventive and potentially revolutionary forces. The irreducible materiality of the screened bodies will moreover be seen as intentionally, or sometimes unintentionally, interrogating the spectators’ own sense of vulnerability and responsibility.