Contemporary Transnational Feminist Visual Activism and Gender-Based Violence

This book illuminates arts activist interventions that raise consciousness and advocacy for women’s right to a life free from violence.

In a context where gender-based violence (GBV) has continued to intensify across the globe, the international range of essays focuses on violations of bodily integrity and autonomy, reproductive, domestic and sexual violence, femicide and feminicide. Comparing and interrogating arts activist strategies and visual methods, the book also explores tactics employed by arts activists attentive to effects and lived experiences of GBV, and imagining potential solutions founded in feminist thinking to change behaviours and raise awareness generating systemic change. The case studies of feminist transnational contemporary arts activism include examples from Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Ghana, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Iraq, Japan, Kuwait, Mexico, Nepal, Poland, South Africa and the United States. Arts engaged include textile work, crafts-making, performance art, clay work, protest art, and documentary art, indicating the breadth and richness of the work of feminist political artists. At a time when, according to the UN Women’s estimates, almost one in three women has been subjected to violence, it is critical to understand how feminist politics catalyses social, cultural, and political changes.

This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, women’s studies, gender studies, and visual culture.

Basia Sliwinska is Researcher at the Institute of Art History of Universidade NOVA de Lisboa and Founding Editor of Taylor&Francis journal Feminist Art Practices and Research: COSMOS.