"She had Agony Written All over Her Face": Representations of Rape in the Work of Rozena Maart‪.‬

Summary The threat and reality of sexual violence structure the daily lives of South African women, and gendered assumptions about women continue to inform our experience of rape as well as public discourses surrounding sexual violence. This article uses both seminal and contemporary feminist research on rape as a theoretical lens for reading Rozena Maart's The Writing Circle (2008). Although the salience of race in the South African context shapes our reading of rape, the article demonstrates that the primary category of analysis in such readings must be gender as women's vulnerability to rape flows from gendered imbalances of power. The article explores the extent to which women are victimised in their own homes and in their family relationships, and thus aims to challenge the popular conception that the greatest threat of sexual violence emanates from strangers. A number of rape myths inform the attitudes of both women and rapists. The article identifies these myths and illustrates how they operate in the lives of Maart's characters. It emerges that the myths, and the misogynist assumptions about women that underlie them, are deeply embedded in the contemporary South African society that is depicted in Maart's novel.