Abstract
Art, Activism, and Sexual Violence carves out a unique space in the booming literature on art as ‘social practice’ and ‘technology for change’, to paraphrase the title of a recent study (burrough and Walgren, 2022). Kitch, Gilpin, and their diverse contributors add to voices from across the fields of Education, Transitional Justice, Law and Criminology, Psychology, Health Sciences, Memory Studies, and of course the traditional Arts and Humanities, who seek to describe, investigate, and theorize the practical value of the aesthetic in addressing and combatting gender-based violence (Boesten and Scanlon, 2021; Green Fryd, 2019; Kurze and Lamont, 2019; Sakamoto, 2014; Shipley and Moriuchi, 2023; Simić, 2016). Two things set Art, Activism, and Sexual Violence apart from such complementary studies. First, the in-depth focus on peacetime sexualized violence permits extended exploration of the particular affordances of different artistic media for engaging with survivors and broader publics. Second, the volume juxtaposes various artistic genres as well as approaches, combining reflections and longer academic essays by artists, historians, journalists, anthropologists, gender scholars, and sociologists. In this respect, the book’s objectives are anchored in social and political practice, serving not merely to analyse artistic interventions in rape culture but to ‘model ways to expose, prevent, and combat it’ (p. xv).
Nik Zaleski and Elizabeth Johnson Levine launch Art, Activism, and Sexual Violence with a foreword describing ‘CounterAct’, a programme of artistic interventions into campus rape culture which they co-directed for Arizona State University between 2016 and 2019, which sets the tone for the entire volume by reflecting on best practice and art’s potential to challenge rape myths, support and empower victim-survivors, and foment a culture of intolerance. Section 1 ( ‘The Transformative Power of the Arts’) includes short chapters by sociologist Steven Tepper and scholar-dramaturg Nicola Olsen on what it means ‘to frame the problem of sexual violence as a cultural problem or one that requires a cultural solution’ (p. 4). Tepper uses compelling examples to consider art’s capacity to bring sexualized violence out in the open, rethink habitual responses to violence, dismantle stigma, reappropriate symbols of oppression, and give shared emotional and political meaning to individual experiences of suffering. Olsen picks up this thread in her think piece, which concludes with an important reminder that artistic engagements with sexualized violence are not intrinsically beneficial and that it is essential for such work to be guided by an ethics of care and ‘Universal Design’ principles.
Part 2 (‘Situating Sexual Violence’) comprises more traditional essays. Sally Kitch explores the historical legal and religious frameworks that underlie US cultures of sexual entitlement and violence, as well as racialized myths about female violability. In chapter 6, the increased risk of intimate partner and domestic violence in the United States during the Covid-19 pandemic prompts Dawn Gilpin’s intriguing discussion of the symbolism of immunity, autonomy, and bodily borders that links discourses surrounding sexual violence, gun culture, epidemics. Chapter 5 by Deborah Martin and Deborah Shaw offers an extremely rich and pertinent reading of ‘Un Violador en tu camino’ (a rapist in your path), which originated with the Chilean feminist theatre collective LasTesis in 2019 and prompted restagings and (multilingual) adaptations globally. They frame the performance as a transl(oc)ation of theory (especially by Rita Segato, 2018) and artistic practice into everyday spaces and modes of embodied and collective thinking. It denounces the politico-legal apparatus that enables rape culture ‘and effectively challenges it by breaking with regimes that consign certain bodies to specific spaces and positions and by inventing new subjects and new forms of collective, disobedient, performative enunciation’ (p. 52).
This chapter is a powerful springboard for Part 3 (‘Art as Advocacy’), which presents 12 artistic responses to sexualized violence. Individual contributions range from Stephanie Leigh Batiste’s performance notes for ‘Young Love Found and Lost: Six Poems in a Cycle’ to Sean Shannon’s introduction to her poem ‘Repressed’, which tackles the intertwined traumas of her rape as a teenager, her father’s decade-long physical and verbal abuse, and society’s attacks on her as a transgender woman. Luzene Hill, Clarity Haynes, and Susanne Slavick likewise walk readers through the thought process behind their works. In the form of a tribute, T De Long contextualizes the ink drawings of trans and queer artist-activist Chloe Dzubilo that document experiences of discrimination, stigma, and abuse, exposing the perpetrators. Sydney Burrows reflects on the dance world’s faltering attempts to address #MeToo and the affordances of this medium for promoting healing and empowerment for performers and audiences. As a queer survivor of violence and grief worker, Jennifer Patterson offers a deeply personal and poetic meditation on linguistic possibilities for conveying the impact of bodily trauma and for transforming it, harnessing the evocative power of embroidery and stitching as metaphors for writing as a process of ‘making and remaking and sometimes unmaking the wound’ (p. 148). In noting that ‘Theory with a capital T, also, sometimes brings me down, makes me doubt my orientation, doubt the rooting of my knowledge in my body’ (p. 147), Patterson underlines the risks and ultimate hollowness of a scholarship that writes around survivors.
The ethical relationship between artist, participant, and audience moves into the focus in chapters by Jennifer Karash-Eastman and Ruta Butkus Marino on the Discomforters series and Emily Bonistall Postel, Elaina Behounek, and Alesha Durfee on the ‘Clothesline Project’. While chapter 12 closes by reflecting on Marino’s evolving attempts to prepare and support audiences, from trigger warnings to concurrent events and information, Bonistall Postel, Behounek, and Durfee emphasize ‘the importance of engaging in praxis and collaborating with community partners [. . .] to create a truly transformative’ and inclusive experience (p. 161). The final contributions to Part 3 by Jasmin Goodman and Wei Sun and Leslie-Jean Thornton move to the digital sphere, analysing posts under the #WhatWereYouWearing and #MeToo hashtags as a way of better understanding the cumulative and participatory effects of arts-based activism.
In Part 4 (‘Looking Ahead’), the editors summarize and provide further contextualization for these diverse forms of artistic activism. For instance, in chapter 18, Kitch reads the featured artworks as a specific kind of ‘anti-violence strategy’ based on asserting control, solidarity, and public engagement (p. 206). The final chapter by Gilpin is designed to inspire future scholarship and activism by reflecting on gaps in the volume itself. While commendably intersectional and inclusive in its selection of contributors and examples, the book only gestures at the specific vulnerabilities of Indigenous Americans and Asian American women, as well as men, prison inmates, those with disabilities, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community. The conclusion draws out the specific challenges faced by marginalized groups when they attempt to report their assaults, and it offers pointers for further reading and engagement, highlighting important activist movements in the United States and internationally.
Neither the questions that Art, Activism, and Sexual Violence poses (Why does sexualized violence persist? Why does art matter? How does culture shape our understanding of sexualized violence? How can art contribute to alternative social imaginaries?), nor the answers that it offers, are particularly novel. However, its purpose is not primarily to espouse a new conceptual framework or theoretical apparatus for understanding the transformative potential of art. Instead, the book is framed as a mode of bearing witness, that is, as a mechanism of support and recognition for victim-survivors, activists, and academics – and, above all, a call-to-action. It is therefore written in an accessible and lively style, which makes it well suited to reaching the widest possible audience. The volume introduces key ideas about symbolic and structural violence and the political dimensions of art in simple language that make it a suitable entry point for undergraduate students interested in the sociocultural dimensions of sexual violence. While many of the ideas may be familiar to researchers already immersed in the subject matter, Art, Activism, and Sexual Violence is nonetheless a rich toolkit of best practice and valuable new resource for scholars and practitioners wishing to deepen their understanding of art activism.
