Abstract

Gender, Sexual Violence, and the Reconfiguration of Power in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

Papanna S.

Volume: 15 Issue: 2 2025

Abstract:

J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), set in the unsettled landscape of post-apartheid South Africa, brings gender, sexuality, race, historical memory, and political transition into an uneasy relationship. This paper examines the novel’s two central episodes of sexual violation: David Lurie’s coercive sexual relationship with his student Melanie Isaacs and the gang rape of his daughter Lucy. Rather than treating the two episodes as identical, the paper argues that Coetzee places them in a disturbing structural relation in order to expose different forms of gendered power. Lurie’s conduct reveals the persistence of patriarchal and institutional privilege even after political structures have changed, while Lucy’s rape demonstrates how sexual violence can become entangled with racial history, land, fear, and the redistribution of power in post-apartheid South Africa. Particular attention is given to Lucy’s refusal to report the rape. Her silence cannot be satisfactorily explained either as passive surrender or as an acceptance of rape as historical retribution. It is instead presented as a difficult attempt to retain control over the meaning of her own experience while negotiating a future in a society whose power relations are being radically reorganized. The paper therefore reads Disgrace as a novel that refuses simple moral binaries. It shows that political liberation does not automatically end gendered domination and that historical injustice cannot ethically justify new violence. Through Lurie and Lucy, Coetzee asks how individuals inhabit a society in transition when older forms of authority have lost legitimacy but new forms of justice and belonging remain uncertain.

DOI: http://doi.org/10.37648/ijrssh.v15i02.017

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