12/21/2023 0 Comments Free instals Clockwork SurvivorsAt the same time, this fictional reworking of trauma constitutes a political act, as it exposes and revises – and at times reiterates – gendered and racial assumptions about women as victims, and of women’s suffering and its representation in a local, South African – as well as in a global, generic – context. I contend that, in so far as they give narrative shape to the female victim’s story, these crime novels can be read as trauma novels that function to testify to and process through fiction the trauma of past and present real violence against women. The authors thereby become the female victims’ advocates. My analysis of the female victim is based on a selection of contemporary South African crime novels that not only give unusual prominence to the female victim, but do so with a view to emphasising via fictional narration the real crimes that South African women suffer. Reading crime fiction through the lens of the female victim, thereby foregrounding her traumas as well as the potential for violence inherent in the representation of femaleness, is therefore a novel approach. ![]() If she does, her tale risks being hijacked by the audience as pornographic spectacle, especially if it is one of sexual violence (Du Toit 2005, 257–258). ![]() While the murderer and, subsequently, the detective in some sense write their stories on the victim’s body, the victim, often conventionally female, seldom gets the chance to tell her story. ![]() Crime novels are either narratives of investigators or narratives of criminals – rarely are they narratives of victims.
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