In J M Coetzee's award winning novel 'Disgrace', the rape of Lucy, a white woman, by the blacks, can be seen as an act of gaining control over the white community by overpowering a 'white woman'. The female bodies have been the objects through which 'control' is attained by the male. ' The trauma of gender violence has been explored in literature time and again. Cathy Caruth, in her book 'Unclaimed Experience' quotes Freud as thus ' …trauma seems to be much more than a pathology, or the simple illness of a wounded psyche it is always the wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available. In later contexts, it came to be known as an injury that was imposed on the mind. The original meaning of the word 'trauma' refers to wounds which are inflicted on the body. The paper attempts a nuanced analysis of how extreme gender violence leads to different kinds of trauma for the victims. The concept of the 'female body', which is used to subjugate women in both body and spirit, can be explored differently in the two stories.

The paper has attempted to compare Emma Donoghue's novel Room and Mahasweta Devi's short story Dopdi with reference to the body pathologies, power structures and identity revealed in the two narratives. The paper seeks to make an examination of 'trauma' in the context of gender.

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