ABSTRACT
This chapter reads selected panels from three graphic narratives to understand how sexual violence needs to be seen within complex histories of hurt and injury as well as within structures of patriarchy. It builds on Sara Ahmed’s work The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014), which speaks about how pain is not just bodily trauma but shatters language and communication. Ahmed comments on how pain is bound up with how we inhabit the world, how we live in relationship to the surfaces, and bodies and objects that make up our dwelling places. Following this, it may be argued that the pain of sexual trauma displaces that sense of habitation and belonging in the world one calls one’s own. Sexual assault and violence communicate patriarchal power, reigning in, enforcing submission and punishing defiance. In these narratives of survival and survivors, the authors employ different visual strategies to shatter modes of verbal and visual communication. They respond to the posturing of shame, located in the female body, with an expression of anger, turning the negative affect of both shame and anger into a personal, intimate as well as a politicised negotiation within the comics medium.
