Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma in American Art Since 1970, by Vivien Green Fryd, Penn State University Press, 2019
"In Against Our Will, Vivien Green Fryd makes a convincing case for the need to examine artworks through the lens of sexual trauma, a violent reality that unfortunately spans across gender, ethnicity, race, and time...
In the book’s final chapter, Fryd compares two versions of Leslie Labowitz’s performance Myths of Rape to highlight ideological shifts that occurred between second- and fourth-wave feminism (representing the 1970s and today, respectively). In the original piece, female performers dressed in black and wore blindfolds while displaying posters that described various myths about sexual assault, such as “rape occurs only amongst strangers” and “it could never happen to me.”
Thirty-five years later, self-declared feminist artists and collaborators Elana Mann and Audrey Chan reimagined the piece, updating it with new knowledge about sexual assault. They retained the black clothing but removed the blindfolds and included males as well as females as performers. Notably, Mann and Chan had their performers wear the posters across their bodies, instead of carrying them, to signify the sexually assaulted body as the site of trauma. This revised performance both modernizes and pays tribute to the original by acknowledging the continued need for rape activism and the historical legacy and collaborative nature of feminist art."
---Jennifer Remenchick, Hyperallergic, September 3, 2019
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Link to the book:
psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-08206-6.html