“Stifling Her Cries”: Doing Justice to Sexual Violence with Coetzee’s Disgrace and Wittgenstein’s Voice of Pain

The failures of securing justice for survivors of sexual violence remain a central concern in contemporary feminist thought. Much recent work has addressed these failures through the frameworks of epistemic and hermeneutical injustice, foregrounding the role of voice in shaping recognition and response. This paper shares that focus on voice but seeks to identify a difficulty that such debates do not fully capture. Drawing on J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace alongside the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, it explores how literature and philosophy together can illuminate this problem. Focusing on the university tribunal scene in Disgrace, which appears to function effectively and deliver justice, the paper argues that something nonetheless remains inadequate. Through a Wittgensteinian account of pain and its expression, the paper comes to show how the tribunal exemplifies a deeper failure—not one of discrediting or disbelieving, but an inability to respond to the human voice of pain as such. Literature and philosophy hereby open a different way of understanding the limits of approaches that prioritise legibility, evidence, and procedural resolution as a way of responding to sexual violence. Rather than securing justice, such approaches risk leaving something essential untouched: what it would mean to answer to another’s suffering.