Editorial (English version)
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- 1 Vanessa Filho, Consent/Le consentement, Moana Films, Windy Production, 2023 ; Vanessa Springora, Co (...)
1This special issue of Transtext(e)s Transcultures entitled “Naming Sexual Violence: Epistemic Power, Narratives and Representations” took shape at a moment when, in France, the issue of sexual violence was more present than ever in public debate. In 2024, the international media coverage of the Mazan rape case brought the issue of drug-facilitated sexual assault and intimate partner violence to the forefront of public discussion, well beyond French borders. In October 2025, the French Parliament approved a bill to incorporate the term “non-consent” into the legal definition of rape in the penal code. This reform is the culmination of many years of public debate around this notion, debates fueled notably by cultural works such as Vanessa Filho’s 2023 film Consent (Le consentement), adapted from Vanessa Springora’s eponymous autobiographical novel, which recounts her abusive relationship as a teenager with the writer Gabriel Matzneff.1 This convergence strikingly illustrates how a single word can become the junction point between intimate testimony, fictional narrative and legal text.
2The #MeToo movement had already prompted a collective reckoning with the importance of survivors’ testimonies in the sphere of the media, and today public debates are more cognizant than ever of the power of words, their definitions and the role of narrative in shaping our understandings of sexual violence, as well as their capacity to drive social change. The question is no longer simply how to “break the silence” around sexual violence but also how to interrogate its discourse: who narrates acts of violence, how and under what conditions, but also, and perhaps more importantly, who hears these narratives, how and through which channels?
3This issue brings together seven contributions (including an interview and a book review) to take stock of these questions and broaden the perspective beyond just the French, or even just the European context by examining how similar issues have emerged with their own specific challenges across different languages and cultural contexts.
4In “Representations of Sexual Violence in Digital Investigative Media in South Korea,” Woojin Na analyses how the independent online investigative outlet Newstapa covered #MeToo testimonies in South Korea in 2018. Na shows how this new media format broke with the sensationalism typical of mainstream outlets by adopting a narrative centered on survivors’ voices. Despite persistent limitations, the article highlights the possibilities opened by alternative and activist forms of journalism.
5Researchers Baljit Kaur and Effie Makepeace – respectively a sociologist and a theater practitioner – reflect on their doctoral fieldwork with women in England and Malawi. Kaur and Makepeace outline the potential of a methodology that reverses conventional power dynamics between researcher and research “subject.” Their creative and participatory approaches seek to produce knowledge about sexual violence alongside the women most directly concerned, recognizing participants as co-researchers. Their case studies illustrate the potential of reciprocal and creative methodologies to access marginalized narratives of traumatic experience and to generate knowledge oriented towards action.
6Anne Grand d’Esnon offers a reception study of a literary work to interrogate interpretive frameworks surrounding rape. Focusing on the novel Disgrace (1999) by South African-born author J.M. Coetzee, she analyses a French radio debate (from the program Répliques) and examines the discourse of the panelists, who distinguish, for example, between the absence of a “rape in the technical sense” and a “real rape” as depicted in the novel. Juxtaposing this reading with Anglo-American feminist scholarship, the article accentuates the cultural dimensions of reception: what one sees, or refuses to see, in a narrative of sexual violence being dependent on collective norms. Grand d’Esnon thus offers a twofold reflection: on representations of sexual violence in fiction and, above all, on how such representations are read. She shifts the center of gravity from author to reader and invites us to interrogate our own interpretive frameworks when faced with narratives of violence.
7Gabrielle Adjerad examines a passage in The Argonauts (2015), American writer Maggie Nelson’s autobiographical text that blends theoretical reflection with personal narrative. In a brief episode, Nelson recounts her experience with a stalker, which functions as a metaphor for violence within a book otherwise oriented toward queer family-making. Adjerad analyzes how Nelson distances the episode by drawing on the conventions of detective fiction, before reading it first through the lens of Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick’s theories and then through Buddhist spirituality. Nelson transforms this moment into an opportunity to interrogate language, extending her reflections on sexual violence and, above all, on how to confront and live with its aftermath.
8In her contribution, Anaïs Cornier offers a terminological clarification focused on the evolution of language surrounding sexual violence in Japan. She traces the history of several key Japanese terms – gōkan (an old legal term for rape), reipu (from the English rape), sekuhara (sexual harassment), and domesutikku baiorensu (domestic violence). By examining the hesitations surrounding the use of these terms, the article shows how they have been created, imported, sometimes abandoned, and how Japanese feminist mobilizations from the 1970s to 2000 played a decisive role in redefining them. This work reveals language as a feminist battleground: the terms chosen, or invented, to speak about rape or harassment can either perpetuate their minimization or impose new ways of conceptualizing violence, underscoring the importance of terminological awareness.
9Finally, the contributions by Keiko Takeda and Christina Misaki Nikitin (an interview and a review) broaden the lens of representation by moving from language to cultural production – music and visual arts. In her interview conducted by Chiharu Chujo, Japanese researcher Keiko Takeda presents her ongoing research on the Japanese idol industry (groups of young female performers such as AKB48 and underground chika idols). Takeda analyzes the media grammar of desire in this milieu: mechanisms of fan proximity such as daily theatre performances, instant-photo cheki sessions and the visual staging of idols in school uniforms, and more. She reveals how fantasies of unilateral sexual availability are constructed and normalized, creating conditions conducive to abuse. The interview also forgrounds the strategies of negotiation and subversion some performers use to reclaim control over their image.
- 2 Marie Buscatto, Sari Karttunen, Mathilde Provansal (ed.), Gender-Based Violence in the Arts and the (...)
10In her review of the recently published volume Gender-Based Violence in the Arts and the Culture: Perspectives on Education and Work, Christina Misaki Nikitin offers a critical reading of this collective work on gender-based violence in artistic and cultural fields (opera, art schools, the electronic music scene, audiovisual production, etc.).2 Anchored in the concept of the continuum of violence, the book shows how the sexualization of bodies, the myth of the “male genius,” and the precarity of artistic labor contribute to normalizing abuse, treating violence not as “individual misconduct” but as a systemic phenomenon.
11Bringing together perspectives from South Korea, Japan, South Africa, the United States, and France, this special issue of Transtext(e)s Transcultures offers a transnational, multidisciplinary exploration of sexual violence, seeking to move beyond Eurocentric and univocal approaches. These contributions collectively examine how we name, conceptualize, narrate and hear sexual violence. Language emerges as a site of struggle – a material that, far from being inert, is constantly in motion and oriented towards action. It thus appears as a medium capable of dismantling the systems of oppression that allow sexual violence to persist.
Notes
1 Vanessa Filho, Consent/Le consentement, Moana Films, Windy Production, 2023 ; Vanessa Springora, Consent: A Memoir (Le consentement), Natasha Lehrer (Translator), New-York, HarperVia, 2021.
2 Marie Buscatto, Sari Karttunen, Mathilde Provansal (ed.), Gender-Based Violence in the Arts and the Culture: Perspective on Education and Work, Cambridge, Open Book Publishers, 2025.
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Chiharu Chujo et Élise Voyau, « Editorial (English version) », Transtext(e)s Transcultures 跨文本跨文化 [En ligne], 19 | 2024, mis en ligne le 30 décembre 2024, consulté le 11 mars 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transtexts/2813 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15bao
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