ABSTRACT
This chapter uses key moments of the author’s personal discomfort during the process of conducting research on rape in South Africa to reflect upon the ways in which sexual violence is widely normalized in South Africa, and therefore considered “unaffecting”. The author reflects upon the ways in which colonial scientific knowledge has been central to the normalization of violence against African womxn in particular. In an attempt to write against these kinds of dehumanizing research practices, Helman presents an approach that she calls affected writing, informed by a decolonial, intersectional feminist framework. By engaging with the ways in which she is affected by conducting research on rape, and specifically how this research has produced a deep sense of discomfort, she proposes an alternative way of “knowing about” rape. This alternative way of knowing involves paying close attention to the intersecting inequalities that constitute both experiences of and research on sexual violence.
