Andra-Mirona Dragotesc is a Romanian feminist with an academic and activist interest in issues of violence against women. Throughout her MA and PhD studies, she has addressed the violent processes embedded in discourses on violence against women. She is currently based in Romania, at Universitatea de Vest din Timisoara.
A few years ago if you’d asked me about Congo I wouldn’t have known very much about it. I knew where it was located on the world map… the geographical world map. As for the social, political, cultural, economical world map, I didn’t quite know where to place it. My interest in violence against women around the world, however, brought Congo to my attention more than once during the second half of the 2000s, and sooner rather than later, I was able to locate Congo on one particular map: the world map of violence against women as the “rape capital of the world”[1].
The horror that is Congo for women is rendered visible through an identification of rape as a problem within the borders of this particular space. The culture of violence thesis which is embedded in the representation of Congo as the rape capital of the world is further supported by categorizations of Congo as the “ground zero of rape”. Making people understand the extent of Congo’s tragedy must be put into a historical perspective of tragedies (9/11, for example) well-known; thus making it easier to understand. I argue it is a way of appropriating the tragedy of Congolese women raped during wartime, of essentialising tragedy in general, and of colonising of tragedies elsewhere by rendering them visible by presenting them as similar to Western/ American ones. That is, of putting a recognizable mask on the face of a complicated problem with deep roots into world economics and Congolese history.
