When our French teacher Angélique Aristondo is not teaching the students all they need to know about the French-speaking language, literature, and cultures, she works on a side research project stemming from her doctoral dissertation.

Recently she presented at the University City Dublin in Ireland at a conference entitled “War Makes Monsters: Crime and Criminality in Times of Conflicts”. In her work on representations of gender-based violence in the colonial press of the interwar period Angélique discusses key rhetorical patterns framing the in/visibility of gender-based violence across the French colonial empire.

In her presentation and ensuing Q&A, she tackled the following questions: through which means was this form of violence obscured and trivialized in the colonial(ist) press? Conversely, how did some periodicals, such as La Dépêche Africaine in France and La Voix du Dahomey in Benin, challenge the authorities as well as the repressive press laws then in place by circulating critiques of colonialism that centered on the suffering of colonized individuals? To what extent did these narratives manage to raise awareness in that period? And how can their failure and success inform international debates on gender-based violence today?