Understanding Sexual Violence through its Timing in Kagiso Lesego Molope’s This Book Betrays my Brother

Abstract

SummaryIn this article, I seek to understand why male sexual violence happens. I look specifically at the temporalities, and inevitably the spatialities, of a rape incident in the novel This Book Betrays my Brother by Kagiso Lesego Molope. In other words, I seek to answer the question: how does the timing of the rape enhance our understanding of why the rape happens and how the perpetrator conceives it? My feminist analysis combines theories of sexual violence and theories of women’s time to unravel the motive for rape as represented in Molope’s novel. Through the analysis, I extrapolate three major arguments from the novel: first, that male sexual violence is the result of masculine territorialisation of women’s bodies; second, that the rape of lesbian and bisexual women is the result of heterosexual men’s failure to accommodate alternative sexualities, hence their action to “discipline” the deviant bodies of women for transgressing the patriarchal sexual order; and lastly, that intra-racial sexual violence in particular is a consequence of the black man’s desire for revenge against racial denigration.