The mass rapes of 1945 in contemporary memory culture: The (gender) politics of metaphor and metonymy

Abstract

Original citation: Stone, Katherine. (2017) The mass rapes of 1945 in contemporary memory culture : the (gender) politics of metaphor and metonymy. European Journal of Cultural Studies . Permanent WRAP URL:http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/93406 Copyright and reuse:The Warwick Research Archive Portal (WRAP) makes this work by researchers of the University of Warwick available open access under the following conditions. Copyright © and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable the material made available in WRAP has been checked for eligibility before being made available.Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not-for profit purposes without prior permission or charge. Provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. Publisher's statement:The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in European Journal of Cultural Studies by SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. ©Katherine Stone Published version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1367549417718207 A note on versions:The version presented here may differ from the published version or, version of record, if you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the 'permanent WRAP url' above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription. This pre-print paper is copyright of the author, but it is free to be used for research purposes as long as it is properly attributed. This paper is intended to circulate work that readers might not otherwise be able to access.While copyright remains mine as the author, I hereby authorize SAGE to act on my behalf to defend my copyright should it be infringed and to retain half of any damages awarded, after deducting costs. Please cite as:Stone It argues that literature can offer a model for such a practice.

Framing Sexual Violence in Portuguese Colonialism: On Some Practices of Contemporary Cultural Representation and Remembrance

“…I argue that Fado Alexandrino exemplifies how the inscription of wartime rape in public remembrance tends to operate through the transfiguration of sexual violence into a metaphor for collective situations of oppression, with little or no space to formulate the emotional damage experienced by real victims of rape. This essay shares Stone's (2018) concern with "listening to or ethically responding to the victim," as well as her belief that literature can offer "a model for a 'mnemographic ethics' that foregrounds the victims of historical violence and their experiential realities, matters that are all too easily suppressed or transfigured in the production of cultural memory" (p. 709). Taking advantage of the potential of polyphony and internal focalization, literature is well suited to formulate rape victims' point of view, to address the complexities of their subjectivities and agency.…”