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‘Something Terrible Happened’: Spectacles of Gendered Violence and Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun

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Narratives of Difference in Globalized Cultures

Part of the book series: New Comparisons in World Literature ((NCWL))

Abstract

This chapter proposes that violence is an integral part of the production and circulation of constructions of gender and sexuality, focusing on the South African case while also using examples from other parts of the world. Examining the interconnectedness of gender, sexuality, race and class with violence in post-apartheid South Africa, the chapter thus situates South African contemporary culture within an interconnected world system. Comparing diverse narratives of gendered violence in the media, parallels are established between the notorious Steenkamp/Pistorius case and Nadine Gordimer’s novel The House Gun. The chapter discusses non-normative sexualities and the construction of masculinity both in Gordimer’s novel and in Pistorious’s trial to expose the persistent global circulation of the ‘blame the victim’ myth.

Key authors, texts, case studies or examples: Nadine Gordimer’s novel The House Gun (1998); The Steenkamp/Pistorius case (2013–14).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This statement was reported by Simon Allison in The Guardian on 3 December 2015. In July 2016, Pistorius was sentenced to six years in prison. The prosecutor deemed the sentence ‘shockingly lenient’ (Burke 2016, online). At the time of writing, appeals are ongoing.

  2. 2.

    Identifying Pandey as ‘India’s daughter’ is problematic because it implies that her worth is relative to her value in a patriarchal system of exchange.

  3. 3.

    This is not to suggest that Booysen’s death did not make international headlines—it did. But the case did receive less coverage than Pandey’s. Following Beth E. Richie’s study (2000), Lisa M. Cuklanz and Sujata Moorti assert that ‘recent studies of news coverage of gendered violence including rape and wife battering have repeatedly shown that cases involving victims of color routinely receive less coverage than cases involving white victims, with the possible exception of celebrity cases, in which either the victim or the accused is well known before the violent incident in question’ (Cuklanz and Moorti 2009, 12–13).

  4. 4.

    This connection was also made by Adam Haupt (2013) writing in The Guardian.

  5. 5.

    Released in June 2013, a World Health Organisation study in partnership with the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and the South African Medical Research Council revealed that globally 35% of all women will experience either intimate partner or non-partner violence. The study also found that intimate partner violence is the most common type of violence against women, affecting 30% of women worldwide.

  6. 6.

    There is important work that remains to be done on contemporary manifestations, and the popularity thereof, of gendered symbolic violence in the Bourdieusian sense, for example in recent years the success of E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, a novel that not only perpetuates the cult of the virgin myth, but is clearly less about sexuality and more about total domination. Such a critique is, however, outside the scope of this article.

  7. 7.

    Anita Sarkeesian’s (2009) website and YouTube channel ‘Feminist Frequency: Conversations with Popular Culture’ is an excellent example.

  8. 8.

    See Pamela Scully’s (2009) article on Jacob Zuma’s 2006 rape trial. In this article Scully outlines the details of the trial and argues that both the trial and its news coverage ‘exposed deep fault lines in South Africa at the juncture of ethnic mobilization and women’s rights. Zuma’s defence proved so adeptly how mobilization around ethnic solidarity could silence criticisms of women’s rights, and how defence of bodily integrity and the right to say no could be an affront to a man’s sense of himself’ (171). This argument is not unique and is reflective of, for example, Chicano criticisms of Chicana feminism . Similarly, in the literary world, there is a long tradition of a backlash against perceived negative portrayals of masculinity, including accusations of treason against women writers who challenge troubling constructions of masculinity, for example Alice Walker and Edwidge Danticat.

  9. 9.

    Valencia Farmer, a 14-year-old girl who, in 1999, was gang raped and then stabbed 53 times before her throat was slit and she was left for dead.

  10. 10.

    For example, Gordimer notably uses this technique in Burger’s Daughter (1979) to discuss the merits and limits of the Black Consciousness movement.

  11. 11.

    Making a similar point in relation to the difficulties of depicting rape and gendered violence in film, even if such depictions aim to challenge the dominant rape script that disempowers women because of the potential for rape narratives to be misappropriated, Jyotika Virdi argues that ‘we are caught between a rock and a hard place: the erasure of rape from the narrative bears the marks of a patriarchal discourse of honour and chastity; yet showing rape, some argue, eroticizes it for the male gaze and purveys the victim myth. How do we refuse to erase the palpability of rape and negotiate the splintering of the private/public trauma associated with it?’ (2006, 266).

  12. 12.

    High-profile cases from other regions include the Norwegian woman who was sentenced to a 16-month jail term for adultery after reporting her own rape in Dubai in 2013; the woman who had fled her own country after being raped in 2014, but who became suicidal when she discovered she was pregnant and was forced to give birth because of Ireland’s abortion laws; and the woman who was attacked in 2016 in the United States in what became known as the Stanford rape case, which made international headlines because of the leniency of the sentence handed down to the perpetrator.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. NUI, Galway, Ireland

    Sorcha Gunne

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  1. Sorcha Gunne
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Correspondence to Sorcha Gunne .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Vigo, Vigo, Spain

    Belén Martín-Lucas

  2. University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Andrea Ruthven

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Gunne, S. (2017). ‘Something Terrible Happened’: Spectacles of Gendered Violence and Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun . In: Martín-Lucas, B., Ruthven, A. (eds) Narratives of Difference in Globalized Cultures. New Comparisons in World Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62133-3_10

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