The Body of a Woman as a Battlefield: Rape and Conflict

‘The group rape perpetrated by the conquerors is a metonymic celebration of territorial acquisition’, Spivak writes in her seminal essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988, 303). Fitzpatrick explores the construction of rape and sexual violence within the dramatic text, and the use of normative conceptions of gender and imperial, postcolonial or nationalist narrative structures to naturalize the representation of sexual violence or to use it as a metaphor for defeat and devastation. From Euripides’ Trojan Women to Lynn Nottage’s Ruined to contemporary verbatim performance in Northern Ireland, Fitzpatrick examines the metonymic ‘body of a woman as a battlefield’ (Visniec), and the strategies used by dramatists to represent the devastation of rape in wartime. [Publisher]