NCJ Number
183283
Journal
Violence Against Women Volume: 6 Issue: 6 Dated: June 2000 Pages: 661-681
Date Published
June 2000
Length
21 pages
Annotation
This article presents an overview of women's art that has dealt with the subject of violence against women.
Abstract
This art is divided into three categories: external violence (e.g., murder, rape, objectification, and religion); home (e.g., domestic violence, battered women, incest, and marriage as a violent institution); and violence against the self (e.g., masochism, eating disorders, and femininity as violence). Each category is discussed from a psychological and artistic perspective. For many of the women artists discussed, the suffering they portray in their work appears also to have been meant as a metaphor for all female suffering as a type of female martyrdom. In 1970 Faith Wilding portrayed her bloody body in "Sacrifice." Frida Kahlo painted herself as the suffering woman in numerous self-portraits. In "Broken Column," she is pierced by nails; and in "The Little Deer," she is impaled by arrows. In a 1940 self-portrait, thorns encircle and perforate her neck. The art discussed in this article offers images of violence and trauma as well as the courage to withstand them. Its functions are educating, healing, empowering, and sometimes simply acknowledging. Some of the pieces are filled with rage. Others are meant as prayers. All of them bear witness to horrible events and to the holding of traumatic reality in consciousness. 28 references