Exceptionality of Space: Sexual Violence in “The Camp. A Little Girl from Karabakh” by Gunel Movlud

Eva Lennartz

2024

Full text Open access: Gold Metadata (CSL-JSON)
DOI 10.5782/2223-2621.2024.27.2.84
Data confidence 70 medium
How this score is calculated

It is built from checkable properties of the record itself: whether the article has a DOI, how many independent sources confirmed its data, whether the required fields are filled in, and how recent the latest confirmation is. Disagreement between sources and a missing identifier lower it. A value of 80 or above means the record was published without further checking; 60 to 79 means it is published at reduced confidence, with a manual check advisable. A record verified by an editor by hand is never pushed below 90 by a recalculation. This scores our data about the article, not the article itself.

Abstract

Khazar Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Volume 27 No 2 2024,84-99 © Khazar University Press 2024 DOI: 10.5782/2223-2621.2024.27.2.84 84 Exceptionality of Space: Sexual Violence in “The Camp. A Little Girl from Karabakh” by Gunel Movlud Eva LennartzNazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstaneva.lennartz@nu.edu.kzAbstractIn the autobiographical novel “The Camp. A Little Girl from Karabakh” the Azerbaijani author Gunel Movlud describes her experiences of living in a refugee camp in the Sabirabad region of Azerbaijan. Movlud was forced to flee her home town in the Nagorno-Karabakh region during the First Karabakh War (1988-1994). For five years, she lived in the tent camp. In the novel, Movlud describes the hardships of the life in the camp and different characters from her personal perspective. What is striking from her observations is the amount of sexual violence apparent in the camp and the seemingly tacit acceptance of the camp inhabitants. This paper seeks to find a theoretical explanation for the violence encountered in the camp. The analysis is based on the novel itself as well as an interview conducted with the author. It is found that Agamben’s ideaof the exceptionality of space and Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence can help explain the violence encountered in the camp. In the author’s view it was women in the end who appeared stronger than men and who held the social fabric of the camp together.