It's not (just) eroticism, it's rape. La mujer desnuda and critique:

a case of epistemic injustice.

Abstract

In this paper we aim to make the connection between academia and militancy, insisting on updating academic practices on the basis of current feminist struggles for more (epistemic) justice. Starting from a dispute that took place in France in 2017 about the pertinence of the use of the term "rape" to characterise a sexual relation in a play by Chénier, we intend to demonstrate the need for a (feminist) political reading from the academy. With this intention, we proceed to a novel analysis of the nouvelle La mujer desnuda (1950; 1967) by the Uruguayan writer Armonía Somers focusing on marital rape. The numerous studies on Somers’s work have focused on the analysis of eroticism, leaving aside what is one of the major taboos of western cisheteropatriarchal society. By focusing our work on this theme, we aim not only to complete and complexify the readings that have been done so far, but also to do justice to Somers's political discourse, which - like most women writers of the same period - has been largely silenced. Throughout the article, we ask why works - even feminist ones - have neglected the subject of marital rape. To do so, we first compare the definition of rape with an excerpt from the nouvelle before proceeding to its analysis in order to justify the use of the term "rape" and to show how Somers deals with this theme. Finally, by broadening the focus, we propose several hypotheses on the reasons why this theme has been ignored. These hypotheses lead us to think about the power relations that sustain the literary field and the academic field.