Gendering and Spacing the Trauma of Sexual Assault: A Father’s Story, A Daughter’s Unspeakable in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

Space and gender are two important factors that determine the way trauma is received and experienced. The meaning, expression and treatment of trauma should be considered in the light of cultural, historical and social conditions. John Maxwell Coetzee offers a portrayal of the socio-cultural and historical landscape with the ongoing racial conflicts inherited from the apartheid regime in the post-apartheid South Africa in Disgrace. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace can be read as an allegory of the suffering, frustration and muddle of Post-Apartheid South Africa where racial, sexual and gender politics intricately work together. The tragic history of South Africa is marked by systematic oppression, violence, exclusion, fragmentation and dispossession. This paper aims to analyze how the experience and symptoms of trauma of sexual assault are determined by the gender of the victim and the place where the offensive contact and trauma are experienced with references to the three characters in Disgrace, the father David Lurie, the daughter Lucy and the female student Melanie.