Affected by Rape

Reviews / Votes

"What kinds of hope are possible in the wake of rape? How can this hope exist alongside a recognition of the wounding of rape, alongside rage? How can rape be collectively mourned, witnessed? What are the affective, racialised, classed and gendered politics that surround the experience of rape in a country like South Africa? These are just a few of the many questions Rebecca Helman tackles in courageous and necessary contribution to the literature on sexual violence in South Africa. With unflinching honesty and profound insight, Helman weaves together an autoethnographic account with narratives from her research participants to illuminate the lived experiences of women who have survived rape. In doing so, she refuses the distancing often demanded by academic inquiry, instead embracing the emotional complexity that surrounds the task of researching trauma - its wounds, the complexity of shame, rage and the fragile yet persistent hope.

What emerges is not only a deeply affecting account of sexual violence as a form of wounding, but also a powerful meditation on the ethics of research, the reflexive politics of voice and the possibilities of feminist scholarship rooted in care, accountability, and transformation. The book is both testimony and theory, both grief and resistance. It is essential reading."

Professor Floretta Boonzaier, University of Cape Town, South Africa

"Affected by Rape: An Intersectional Approach to Researching Sexual Violence is a focused analysis of the multiple and intersecting articulations between affective and material, social and political dimensions that present in violent economies of gender and sexual violence in South Africa. Helman weaves the affective dynamics that are part of rape culture and the broader socio-historical, political and material arrangements that sustain them and vice versa. Helman carefully lays out the ambiguous yet vital necessity of an "affective archive of rape". Drawing on decolonial feminist scholarship, she carefully locates interwoven affects that include rage, shame, hope to ponder economies of affect that inadvertently function to further silence the ravages of gender and sexual violence in post- apartheid South Africa. Throughout this investigation of what it means to work with research as a mode of "affective witnessing", Helman urges that we do not lose sight of the complex multiple systems of domination that in turn demand a moral witnessing, one that invites a different use of rage as part of our galvanizing, that honors Audre Lorde's call for a redirected anger that is politically productive."

Professor Peace Kiguwa, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

"This book is an emotionally-moving and intellectually rigorous exploration of sexual violence in South Africa, unfolding from a moment of personal discomfort into a layered analysis of embodied experience and structural oppression. Through autoethnography and interviews with 17 womxn from diverse racial and social backgrounds, Helman centres 'ordinary' experiences of rape to challenge dominant narratives about who is violated, who violates, and whose pain is recognized. Grounded in affective, decolonial, and critical race approaches, this work offers a context-specific, intersectional account of rape. Rather than relying on narrow legal or medical frameworks, Helman traces rape's enduring impacts-violation, shame, rage, and hope-foregrounding the emotional labour of witnessing and the charged politics of knowledge production. In following participants' affect-laden accounts, she shows how shame sticks to bodies, how rage is pathologized yet mobilized as resistance, and how hope is cultivated in the wake of trauma. The result is a book that moves us beyond the "problem," becoming a vital act of resistance, a call to reimagine justice, a guide to dismantling rape culture, and an invitation to build more care-filled, decolonial responses and futures."

Professor Carla Rice, University of Guelph, Ontario

"This book makes a powerful and important contribution to feminist scholarship on sexual violence. Helman's commitment to affect, and to the critical intersections that shape it, infuses the theoretical, methodological and written work throughout - producing a nuanced and embodied read that departs from the tendency towards abstraction and sensationalism. It offers a textured, compassionate, and intimate - yet intellectually rigorous - feminist engagement with sexual violence."

Dr Denise Buiten, The University of Notre Dame, Sydney