Sexual Assault and Reification of the Woman in some Cameroonian feminist novels

Abstract

The Cameroonian feminist novel is a combat novel. It acts as a form of advocacy that the writer formulates in order to postulate more dignified gender relations. In this novel, the demiurge fights for the advent of a more just social order at the heart of which all genders are equal and all sexes owe each other mutual respect. The novel works in several directions: to restore women's reputation in terms of rights and to allow them to dispose of their own bodies as respected human beings. However, this goal of re-appropriating the female body runs up against a certain phallocratic vision of gender relations aimed at keeping women in the sexist bosom. Consequently, as a mode of declining sexual violence, does sexual aggression not participate in strategies whose aim is only the reification of women? By drawing inspiration from the sociocritical conceptual apparatus formalised by Pierre Barbéris and the gender approach, we answer this research question. The work is organized in three parts. In the first part, we examine the forms of violence against women in the feminist text under examination. The second part deals with the stylization of sexual violence. It questions the linguistic forms at work in the literary text, since the literary work is above all a work of art: beyond the reproduction of the observed facts, it is the production of language. The last part is concerned with the novelists' message or their vision of the world on the issue of sexual assault. The aim of this part is to show that rape is a serious violation of women's rights, a major obstacle to their empowerment and the affirmation of their identity.