Writing Gender Violence: Ethics, Challenges, Possibilities

Panel for the 2025 American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) annual meeting (online, May 29 - June 1, 2025).

This panel aims to discuss how literature engages with the topic of gender violence by adopting a transnational, dialogic, and relational approach. We are interested in exploring how literature responds to – and potentially creates connections between – different manifestations of gender violence: from the sexual slavery of the “comfort women”, to the murders of indigenous women in Canada (MMIWG), to the weaponization of rape during war and conflict (think about the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan), and to femi(ni)cide in Latin America and elsewhere. When it comes to these diverse histories and geographies of gender violence, literature can constitute a site of memory, repair, healing, and testimony. At the same time, however, scholars (Bronfen 1992, Close 2018) have shown that literature can also become complicit in gender violence by aestheticizing, sensationalizing, and even eroticizing it. Through the transnational and transhistorical scope of this seminar, we hope to illuminate the challenges, possibilities, tensions, and ethical conundrums that attend the literary representation of gender violence.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• Memory

• Repair, Resistance, Resilience

• State power, Nation/Nationalism

• Folklores and Mythologies

• Postcolonial Studies

• Race/Ethnicity/Minority Studies

• Spectrality (how does the figure of the phantom/fantastic appear through instances of violence)

• Anthropocene Studies (how gender violence is entangled with environmental violence)

• The ethics of representation

• Aesthetic form

• The construction of the figures of victim and perpetrator

• Complicity/Implication

• Intersectionality

• Feminist solidarity