Manon Garcia

“Dominique Pelicot’s fifty co-defendants raped Gisèle Pelicot, but in the end, it is as if she hadn’t even been there. The House of Sleeping Beauties and indeed Sleeping Beauty itself are myths in which the woman is there as a representation, as an object, but where she, as a person, has no place. She is a body and nothing else. The necrophiliac fantasy that fuelled the rapes of Gisèle Pelicot functions in the same way: it is her, but it is not her. Everything that makes Gisèle Pelicot Gisèle Pelicot – her joy, her gentleness, her strength – all of that is dissolved and drained away by the drugs, leaving only a lifeless object. This absolute objectification, which serves to negate the very existence of the other, is reflected in the language used by the defendants. Dominique Pelicot never mentions Gisèle by name: she is his ‘saint’, his ‘love’; in his obscene correspondence she is his ‘slut’, but these are just standard images, the Mother and the Whore.”
― Manon Garcia, Mit Männern leben: Überlegungen zum Pelicot-Prozess