Violence against Women in Wars: With Reference to Danai Gurira's Eclipsed and Lynn Nottage's Ruined

Dr. Ammar Shamil Kadhim Al-Khafaji,

Department of English, College of Arts, University of Baghdad, Bab Al-Muadum Campus, Baghdad, Iraq

The spread of terror in the world as well as the civil wars and conflicts in the early twenty-first century all over the world have caused a lot of damage and left great victims. The terrorist attacks on women like the abduction of over 270 school girls by Boko Haram in Nigeria and reports of widespread rape and sexual abuse in war-torn territories have generated numerous theatrical productions in the United States that envision the subjectivities of perpetrators as well as victims of violence. A number of plays, predominantly composed by women, focus more specifically on the experience of women in war and foreground ideologies of gender inscribed on bodies and transformed into brutal practices. African and African immigrant women's writings in English for the American theater have also depicted women of Africa in relationship with sexual violence and disease.  The main purpose of the research is to clarify and investigate the two plays in detail: Danai Gurira 's Eclipsed and Lynn Nottage's Ruined whose incidents take place in Africa.  The first play sheds light on the ordeal of some women near the end of the Second Liberian Civil War. The second play explores the plight of women during the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The powerless women in both plays, find themselves caught in an impossible historical situation violently played out on their bodies. Within a diasporic context, these plays put black Americans and Africans in conversation about the after-effects of colonialism, appropriation, civil war, and genocide. The importance of these stories cannot be stressed enough, but their theatrical dominance raises an important question. The paper aims to prove how the efforts done by the playwright to use theatre as a place for moral preaching against the oppression of women in the whole world and a turn towards transnational feminism are really useful.

Keywords: Dehumanization, Feminism, Gender, Trans Nationality

The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The Ninth International Conference on Languages, Linguistics, Translation and Literature (WWW.LLLD.IR), 1-2 February 2024, Ahwaz.