Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma in American Art Since 1970

Female artists of the 1970s used their works to challenge social conceptions of rape and incest and shift the dominant narrative of violence against women. Vivien Green Fryd charts this decades-long radical intervention through an art-historical lens, highlighting specific themes such as rape and incest against white and black female bodies, rape against white and black male bodies, and rape and pornography. This groundbreaking and timely project explores sexual violence as a discrete subject of American art with open eyes and unflinching analysis.

Format: Hardback
Length: 368 pages
Publication date: 05 February 2019
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press

Female artists actively participated in the feminist movement of the 1970s, utilizing their artistic creations to challenge prevailing societal perceptions and legal definitions related to rape and incest. Through the lens of art history, Vivien Green Fryd explores this decade-long radical intervention in her book. Fryd demonstrates how American artists like Suzanne Lacy, Leslie Labowitz, Faith Ringgold, Judy Chicago, and Kara Walker tirelessly advocated for the eradication of the silence surrounding sexual violence, contributing to the development of an anti-rape and anti-incest counternarrative that continues to resonate today. She examines how second-wave feminist artists established the significance of addressing sexual violence against women and how their successors in the third wave subsequently framed their works within this visual and rhetorical tradition. Throughout, Fryd highlights specific themes such as rape and incest against white and black female bodies, rape against white and black male bodies, and the intersection of rape and pornography with other challenges to and critiques of the sociocultural and political patriarchy from the 1970s to the present day.

Featuring numerous illustrative works and authored by an art historian who is also a scholar of PTSD and a survivor herself, this groundbreaking and timely project delves into sexual violence as a distinct subject of American art with open eyes and unflinching analysis. Against Our Will invites the reader to bear witness to the trauma in a manner akin to the works studied by Fryd.

Weight: 1246g
Dimension: 190 x 266 x 35 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780271082066