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Jane Orleman (American, born 1942) is an artist and a survivor of child sexual abuse. Through paintings she created during therapy, Orleman rejects the gendered and patriarchal binaries between therapeutic art and professional art, which pit the private, feminine, and intuitive against the public, masculine, and intellectual. By analysing selected artworks from Orleman that embody her child self, young woman self, and alternative self, I propose that Orleman reflects on and challenges the pathology of sexual trauma along with the discourse of sexual violence as a political statement. Therefore, I argue that her art deserves to be part of a larger, counternarrative, anti-rape and anti-incest cycle in contemporary American art.

This article considers a Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer protest at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights as a flashpoint that exposes problems with how memory-making institutions are incorporating lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer issues into their programming and/or collections. The protest brings into relief the museum’s investment in a homocolonial framing of remembrance for the way in which the telling of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer ‘progress’ is entangled with a settler colonial political economy wherein the tokenistic inclusion of some queers into the sexual citizenry happens alongside the dispossession, devaluing and criminalizing of others. I then undertake some preliminary ‘curatorial dreaming’ upon two other interventions–commentaries uploaded to a digital story bank by a Two-Spirit and an Indigenous queer museumgoer, and the short film Woman Dress by Plains Cree artist TJ Cuthand. Along with the protest, the commentaries and the film unsettle homocolonial frames of remembrance and provide critical openings towards decolonial queer memory work at the museum.

Depictions of sexual violence are frequently found in the collections and displays of art museums, and material that represents and affirms violence against women often is displayed unchallenged. This article poses questions about how the presence of this material has been addressed in the relations between feminist activism against sexual violence, art made by artists responding to and participating in feminist activism, and the curatorial activities that have arisen to address the challenges that these activities present to art museums. The chapter investigates the 2021 exhibition Titian: Women, Myth and Power at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and its handling of themes of rape in the central exhibit, Titian’s Rape of Europa; the history of themes of rape in feminist art since the 1970s and in exhibitions of this art that have taken place in museums in the last two decades; and curatorial engagements with sexual violence and rape in recent art exhibitions in the US and in the UK. The article argues that new strategies for the presentation and interpretation of artworks dealing with sexual violence are needed for museums to redress the patriarchal and colonial presence of sexual violence in their collection.

Absent mechanisms of restorative justice, victims of sexual harassment, particularly those within the LGBT+ community that are already frequent targets of relational aggression, are unlikely to either report or reckon with the consequences of inappropriate workplace behaviors and discrimination. Written from the perspective of a masculinized bisexual whose encounter with a pervasive culture of sexual harassment and psychological abuse provoked suicidal ideation, this paper employs the artistic practices of illustration as a means of first re-cognizing and recognizing phenomena, a Ricœurean construct of narrative and a palimpsest of multivocal text and images to evoke the lived experience of harassment and an analytic layer to invoke the phenomenon. By drawing, writing, and thinking through the phenomenon, the marriage of artistic and phenomenological approaches allows both researcher and reader to confront the ‘painful truths’ that otherwise resist easy analysis.

This article examines sexual and gendered harassment among professional female editorial photographers, whose experiences have largely been under-researched. It draws on semi-structured interviews conducted between 2017–2019 with 17 female professional editorial photographers, aged 23–82, who work in a variety of beats. Sixteen of 17 interviewees encountered sexual harassment, with gendered harassment the most common. Harassers included professors, other photographers, colleagues, salespeople, subjects, and the general public, whom photographers encountered at school, work, while networking, and when using and buying gear. Largely, participants addressed the sexual and gendered harassment on an individual level, rather than reporting it to editors or other authorities. These findings add qualitative nuance to quantitative research that suggests physical risks and economic precarity may drive women from the profession.

In October 2017, the Nordic Museum in Stockholm launched its #metoo collection. The aim was to capture the viral #MeToo campaign that in Sweden has been likened to a (feminist) revolution. Based on archival research, interviews and media analysis, this article explores public submissions to the #metoo collection and analyses the museum’s rationale for collecting what is considered to be difficult cultural heritage. Noting the absence of images in the collection, the article argues that the iconic hashtag #MeToo constitutes an alternative form of digital visuality, here termed hashtag visuality. Hashtag visuality, the article suggests, is an emerging form of visual representation that captures the multimodal logic of social media, blurring distinctions between texts and images. In Sweden, #MeToo hashtag visuality reveals the contradictory prevalence of structural sexism and sexual violence in a country with a national self-image of gender equality and a self-proclaimed feminist government, while affirming feminist agency.

While the presence of women in photojournalism is increasing, the way they are treated by their male counterparts remains unbalanced. Drawing from feminist theory and embodiment, this study examines how the gendered experience plays out for women in a particular niche of photojournalism; concert photography. The restricted access of the music scene and the embodied nature of photojournalism combine to present unique barriers for women. In-depth interviews with male and female concert photographers show women still face a form of patriarchal oppression in the field. This is seen through gendered language, such as ‘one of the guys’ versus a ‘mom in the pit’, embodied actions such as direct sexual harassment or indirect benevolent sexism, and in how women are questioned when they identify themselves as a photographer.

Women in India cope with an ongoing sense of precarity owing to the frequency of street harassment and sexual violence; this impacts their freedom to travel and sense of autonomous agency. The December 2012 Nirbhaya case, the rape and fatal injury of a Delhi medical student, returned the subject of rape to public discourse leading to mass protests and, eventually, some stronger anti-rape laws; however, #metoo allegations surface weekly, and artists and activists are demanding that the trivialization of rape and verbal abuse stop and active steps be taken to dismantle the cultural scaffolding undergirding twomen's violation. In 2014 a collaboration by Zubaan Press (New Delhi) and the Goethe Institute (Germany) brought a group of Indian graphic artists together to create stories about women’s ground realities and the microaggressions they experience. The resulting publication, Drawing the Line: Indian Women Fight Back, contains fourteen vignettes which reveal the constraints women experience and also illuminate women’s capacity for resilience and boldness. This essay analyzes the forms of resistance imagined in these narratives, how particular stories illuminate slow violence, and what may be lost if we know little about the perpetrators who commit these acts against women.