Stalkers, rapists and abusers

The other Terrorists – their literary construction

Abstract

The aim of this article is to provide literary examples that will throw some light into a perplexing fact: it is difficult to understand why the political powers and society at large avert their gaze from the battering, violating and murdering of women. The main reason could be that female dependency is inscribed in the collective unconscious throughout the world, and that the dominant discourse prevents any change, fearful of the consequences that such a revolution would mean both to the social order and to the economy. It is easier to count female victims by the thousands than awake to incontrovertible and logical reasons – Goya inscribed this situation in one of his Caprices: “The sleep of Reason produces monsters”. My contention is that these monsters, that walk the streets alongside us, should be named properly as terrorists and be judged as such. Literature is constantly denouncing their deeds, through the globe and in all languages. In this article we analyse but a few examples by Ruth Rendell, Louise Doughty, Judith Hermann, Nawal al-Saadawi, Roddy Doyle, Mohsin Hamid, Suniti Namjoshi and Margaret Drabble.