Trauma Without Politics: Western Media, Sexual Violence, and the Colonial Gaze in Rwanda and the DRC

• In Event: Cutting-edge of Race, Gender, Class Scholarship: Open Call Paper Session

Abstract

This paper traces the transformation of French and Belgian media representations of sexual violence in the Great Lakes region of Africa over three decades (1994–2024). Through qualitative content analysis of 25 articles from Le Monde (France) and Le Soir (Belgium), I demonstrate that coverage shifted from a politically contextualized genocide framework—in which rape was understood as a systematic weapon of ethnic extermination—to depoliticized "trauma porn" narratives that sever historical continuity, erase perpetrator identification, reduce survivors from juridical subjects to humanitarian objects, and reproduce colonial tropes of African savagery. Drawing on decolonized feminist theory (Mohanty 2003; Collins 2000; Tamale 2020) and critical media scholarship (Chouliaraki 2006; Meger 2016), I argue that this depoliticization is not accidental but serves identifiable interests: obscuring the ongoing character of genocide ideology across the Rwandan-Congolese border, protecting Western economic stakes in mineral extraction, and sustaining a humanitarian-media complex that requires perpetual crisis and absent local agency. The paper identifies five interlocking mechanisms of depoliticization and demonstrates their material consequences for justice, accountability, and survivor empowerment.

Author

• Jessica Mwiza, Graduate Center CUNY