Rape, Representation, and the Endurance of Hegemonic Masculinity

This article mines the history of rape jurisprudence to illuminate how the legal treatment of wartime rape informs long-standing gendered tropes that dominate its understanding on the ground as well as its representation in literary and cultural texts. The essay concludes by reading Congolese novelist Emmanuel Dongala’s Johnny Mad Dog as a model for a dialogic literary imagination capable of revealing the fatal consequences of toxic masculinity as it informs not only the perpetration of rape in wartime, but also the possibility for either perpetrator or victim to achieve subjectivity free from the burdens of brutally constraining gender norms.