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While there is a lack of research into abuse in elite dance, numerous allegations of emotional, sexual and physical abuse of dancers can be found anecdotally in the media, legal convictions and personal accounts. As more dancers speak out, the scale of the problem within preprofessional schools and professional companies is becoming apparent. Accordingly, effective safeguarding mechanisms for preventing, identifying and reporting abuse are urgently needed. This viewpoint is intended to raise health professionals’ awareness of factors contributing to abusive practices found in dance environments and the potential clinical implications of abuse to dancers’ health and well-being. We also call for research and policy engagement on safeguarding and abuse prevention designed and implemented in partnership with stakeholders, aiming to promote safe and positive dance environments for all.

Background: Universities’ responses to sexual violence have faced scrutiny for their lack of proactiveness and their failure to address campus socio-cultural norms that contribute to rape myth acceptance. The labels victim and survivor play a crucial role in shaping attitudes toward sexual violence, but there is limited research on how university students perceive these labels. Objective: This paper explores sexual violence labels and their role in perpetuating rape culture. Undergraduate university students’ beliefs on using the label survivor instead of victim to describe someone who has experienced sexual violence were examined to consider how these labels create societal discourse on sexual violence. Method: The study draws on qualitative data collected from undergraduate students in Canada and the United States through open-response questions in an interactive textbook. Data were analysed and interpreted using a multi-method approach that combined principles of Critical Discourse Analysis and Feminist Poststructuralism. Direct quotes and word clouds from participants’ responses are used as evidence and to visually display discourse. Results: Findings revealed that participants recognised the negative societal discourses associated with the label victim and supported using survivor to challenge perceptions of sexual violence. Despite this, participants expressed hesitancy to adopt the label survivor because of the potential negative implications, such as the label promoting the allocation of individual blame, increasing barriers to justice, and reducing the perceived severity of sexual violence. Conclusions: This study underscores the complexities of sexual violence labels, the influence of language in shaping societal perceptions, and the need for a more comprehensive and equitable approach to responding to sexual violence. Dichotomy of Labels and Nuanced Perceptions: Sexual violence labels shape identity perceptions. Participants dichotomised the labels victim and survivor, associating one with negative attributes and the other with positive attributes. However, nuanced views of how people perceive and identify with these labels challenge distinct categories. Victims being negatively perceived, while survivors are admired for their resiliency highlights complexities in societal expectations that may not fully address the underlying determinants of sexual violence.Role of Language in Reproduction of Rape Culture: Poststructuralist theories emphasise the role of language in the production and maintenance of discourse. The study shows that victim discourse is steeped in rape myths. The historical discourse surrounding the label may contribute to the perpetuation of negative attitudes and behaviours toward victims of sexual violence. The emergence of the label survivor reflects a societal shift, but findings suggest this may lead to societal complacency towards sexual violence.Spectrum of Severity and Societal Empathy: Participants’ understanding of sexual violence as a spectrum of severity may lead to unequal levels of empathy and support. This discourse creates positions of dominance and oppression, potentially marginalising certain groups who are disproportionately affected by sexual violence. The study highlights how severity discourse can influence institutional agendas and may result in political and institutional neglect of sexual violence. Dichotomy of Labels and Nuanced Perceptions: Sexual violence labels shape identity perceptions. Participants dichotomised the labels victim and survivor, associating one with negative attributes and the other with positive attributes. However, nuanced views of how people perceive and identify with these labels challenge distinct categories. Victims being negatively perceived, while survivors are admired for their resiliency highlights complexities in societal expectations that may not fully address the underlying determinants of sexual violence. Role of Language in Reproduction of Rape Culture: Poststructuralist theories emphasise the role of language in the production and maintenance of discourse. The study shows that victim discourse is steeped in rape myths. The historical discourse surrounding the label may contribute to the perpetuation of negative attitudes and behaviours toward victims of sexual violence. The emergence of the label survivor reflects a societal shift, but findings suggest this may lead to societal complacency towards sexual violence. Spectrum of Severity and Societal Empathy: Participants’ understanding of sexual violence as a spectrum of severity may lead to unequal levels of empathy and support. This discourse creates positions of dominance and oppression, potentially marginalising certain groups who are disproportionately affected by sexual violence. The study highlights how severity discourse can influence institutional agendas and may result in political and institutional neglect of sexual violence.

Despite several high-profile cases and years of #MeToo activism, a lack of systemic change and consistent consequences for many alleged offenders has led journalists and fans to wonder when the popular music and stand-up comedy industries will truly have their ‘MeToo moment.’ In this article, we explain that this moment has already arrived, but has produced inconsistent results in these industries due to the unique cultural and structural obstacles they share, and which frustrate civil sphere actors’ attempts at civil repair. Our analysis draws on Jeffrey C. Alexander’s (2018, 2019) theory of societalization – the process by which institutional crises come to be seen as social problems that demand the intervention of civil sphere actors. We argue that where #MeToo and the popular music and stand-up comedy industries are concerned, the process of societalization has been (and will likely continue to be) ‘blocked’ or ‘stalled’ (Alexander, 2018, 2019). We suggest that the potential for societalization is reduced due to a combination of the arts sphere’s anti-civil values and weak institutionalization in the popular music and stand-up comedy industries.

Over the last decade, mainstream media sources from the US and UK have shown an increased interest in topics involving transgender and non-binary populations. Yet, their portrayals of such individuals tend to reaffirm rather than challenge cisnormative ideas surrounding bodies and gender. In this article, we consider this ongoing trend within the highly body-centric, traditionally-gendered artform—classical ballet. With a transgender studies and dance studies lens, we analyze current discourse surrounding the recent move for classical ballet companies and schools to adapt casting and training curricula to better include non-binary dancers. Through these analyses we reveal ways media sensationalizes the transgender body by focusing on information regarding hormone therapy and surgeries, and with the topic of ballet in mind, how this transphobic move becomes intertwined with ballet-specific processes of reshaping the body. We claim that although these popular press pieces contribute to a greater awareness of the lived experiences of transgender and non-binary dancers, they simultaneously reiterate ongoing balletic gender tropes that mark the artform as feminine and designate particular body types and movements to specific binarized genders.

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.

The cultural and creative industries are the fastest growing industries in the UK (). Stakeholder engagement, media reporting, anecdotal evidence and emerging research suggests that there are endemic levels of sexual harassment and sexualised violence within the music industry that can be described as widespread, systemic and normalised. This article reviews the literature on sexual harassment and sexualised violence in the music industry, examining gender stratifications and inequalities within the music industry with a focus on UK, Australian and US studies. The music industry is not a singular entity but instead, is an agglomeration of many different sub-sectors predominantly consisting of three interconnected spheres of music recording and distribution, music publishing and licensing, and live performance. This paper references Kelly’s (; ; ) theorisations on conducive contexts and the continuum of violence to argue that historical and entrenched misogyny and sexism along with the lack of regulation, process and governing frameworks create conditions for both the maintenance of gender inequality and the perpetuation of sexual harassment and sexualised violence within the music industry. Consequently, both the cultural context and the practice of misogyny (in this case sexual harassment and sexualised violence) within the music industry are mutually supporting and reinforcing.

Cet article dresse le portrait de cinq organisations qui militent pour l’équité en musique au Québec depuis 2017 : MTL Women in Music, Femmes* en Musique, Lotus collective MTL Coop, shesaid.so MTL et le réseau DIG! Différences et inégalités de genre dans la musique au Québec. En s’inscrivant d’abord dans la longue lignée des travaux critiques en historiographie féministe, l’article rend compte de la pluralité des mobilisations féministes et ce, au-delà des « vagues » #moiaussi qui ont ponctué l’actualité musicale québécoise au cours des cinq dernières années (2017–2022). Dans la seconde partie, les autrices détaillent les travaux du réseau D!G , lancé en avril 2021 par Vanessa Blais-Tremblay, et présentent des retombées initiales prometteuses à la fois pour le milieu universitaire et pour les milieux de pratique en ce qui concerne l’épistémologie et les méthodologies de la « musicologie partenariale collaborative féministe ». , This article profiles five organizations that have been advocating for equity in Quebec music since 2017 : MTL Women in Music, Femmes* en Musique, Lotus collective MTL Coop, shesaid.so MTL and D!G Différences et inégalités de genre dans la musique au Québec. In line with a long tradition of critical work in feminist historiography, the authors first account for the diversity of feminist mobilizations in Quebec music beyond the #metoo “waves” which have received significant media attention over the past five years (2017–2022). In the second part, the authors detail the development of the D!G network, a feminist collaborative research partnership launched in April 2021 by Vanessa Blais-Tremblay, and its contributions to both Quebec’s music industry and to feminist partnership research epistemologies and methodologies.

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.

Sexual harassment is a problem that continues to plague mostly women in the American workforce today. One tool that victims can use in these situations is confrontation, either through verbal or physical means. Yet, understudied to this point is how perpetrators respond to confrontation, which is highly salient as to whether this is an effective tool for victims. This study uses grounded theory methods to analyze 31 accounts of sexual harassment from within the fashion industry that recorded perpetrators' responses to victim confrontation to clearly unwanted, abusive behavior. I argue that specific features of the fashion industry, or a “display work culture,” embolden perpetrators to effectively thwart any type of confrontation. Indeed, this study finds that these predominantly male perpetrators of sexual harassment moved to reassert their dominant position over their female victims in the moment of confrontation, immediately after being confronted, and even later, well beyond confrontation, as they aimed to reestablish normal business practices as usual. This research thus dispels a significant sexual harassment myth that victims working within this culture are able to stop perpetrators simply by speaking up and/or fighting back and points to the need for the development of sexual harassment theory to incorporate work culture-related risk factors and remedies.

Les enjeux liés aux luttes menées par les personnes trans’ sont une parfaite illustration du fait que la visibilité ne suffit pas et qu’elle peut même parfois se révéler préjudiciable. En effet, depuis quelques mois, la presse, la télévision, la radio s’agitent dès qu’une actualité touche de près ou de loin à la transidentité. Actuellement, les voix des trans’ sont encore trop souvent couvertes par les discours cis’, lesquels tendent également à délégitimer les savoirs produits par et pour des trans’. Il est grand temps de retourner la lunette : au lieu de scruter les personnes trans’ – leur transition –, il est urgent de les lire et de les écouter. Ces expériences-là ont certes des choses à apprendre aux personnes cis’ : bien sûr que l’on comprend mieux ce qu’est le genre face à des personnes qui ont fait l’expérience de quitter celui qui leur a été assigné à la naissance, bien sûr que cela rend plus insupportable encore la rigidité des normes de genre, binaires et arbitraires jusqu’à l’absurde. Mais au-delà de ce que les cis’ peuvent apprendre des trans’ pour mieux se comprendre elles-mêmes et eux-mêmes, au-delà de cette lecture instrumentale, il s’agit désormais de laisser les marges parler. Il s’agit de se concentrer sur les luttes sociales, les revendications portées par les personnes trans’ et les associations, de défendre les conditions matérielles d’existence des trans’, de lutter contre les nombreuses discriminations qui pèsent encore sur elles et eux, y compris contre celles qui limitent drastiquement leur accès aux positions permettant de produire légitimement du savoir, il s’agit de les laisser libres de définir leurs cadres de pensée et la manière dont ils, elles, iels souhaitent parler ou pas de leurs parcours. De les laisser, enfin, écrire leur histoire.

Since 2017, the #MeToo movement has highlighted gender-based violence and harassment in the comedy industry, where those comedians affected have little to no workplace infrastructure to lean on. Because comedy clubs are described as venues rather than sites of work, comedy workers are not technically employees and are not protected by workplace safety laws nor supported by professional organizations or unions. We argue that the lack of a formal workplace and its related precarity exacerbates violence against women, queer, transgender, disabled, and/or workers in the Canadian and American comedy industries, pushing comedy workers to enact do-it-yourself workplace safety strategies to protect themselves and one another. We describe these protective, caring activities as akin to Brenda Parker’s “double killjoy,” and push our understanding of creative work into places of public resistance and life-making.

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.

In India, the 2012 Delhi gang rape case catalyzed protests for women’s rights, particularly in regard to their safety. These demands were rekindled with vigor anew with the eruption of the #MeToo movement. In the Indian film industry, the most visible change appeared in the gradual increase of films with womenleads. But behind the scenes, there has been comparatively less change in female representation. Currently, approximately less than 10% of film directors in India are women. Considering the impor­ tance of having stories about women being made by women, in this article I examine the factors that hinder women’s entrance and tenure in the Mumbai film industry. I argue that a composite of concerns, including but not limited to reputability and personal security, thwarts women’s progress in the industry. I base my con­ clusions on interviews with women and men working in the film industry, conducted in Mumbai in 2017. I use the framework of the Ambivalent Sexism Index developed by psychologists Glick and Fiske in 1996, and revised in 2013, (1996, 2001, 2013) to examine my interviewees’ encounters with hostile and benevolent sexism. This article complicates our understanding of the reasons that limit the work of women beyond explanations of overt discrimination.

This article examines the work of intimacy coordinators on television drama and film sets and the rise of this new role in the screen industry from a policy and production studies perspective. Since HBO made the employment of an intimacy coordinator mandatory on all productions with scenes of sex, nudity, and physical intimacy in 2018, intimacy coordination has become an industry standard and expectation. Through interviews and analysis of production practices, this article explores how intimacy coordinators change and challenge established production practices on and off set and interrogates the reasons behind the emergence of this role in the screen industry. It situates intimacy coordination in the context of recent industry policies and initiatives that promote equality and diversity, and counter harassment and abuse in the post-Weinstein era. It analyses this role on relation to changing production and distribution models and regimes in the era of VOD portals. The article argues that intimacy coordination is not only a catalyst for reforming practices on set, but a way for the screen industry to negotiate contemporary and historic concerns about sexual harassment and abuse, comply with recent policy and funding requirements, and a mechanism for mitigating economic and reputational risk to productions.

Que fait #MeToo fait à la lecture, à la critique et à l’enseignement des textes littéraires ? Le mouvement #MeToo a contribué à une large prise de conscience quant aux enjeux linguistiques liés aux violences sexuelles et sexistes : lutter contre de ces violences suppose d’abord de nommer un viol un viol. Mais une telle exigence de désambiguïsation peut entrer en contradiction avec la complexité interprétative valorisée dans le cadre de la lecture littéraire. Elle présenterait par ailleurs le risque d'inviter à lire des textes éloignés de nous dans le temps et l’espace en les évaluant à l’aune de notions et d’une morale contemporaines jugées anachroniques. Prolongeant les réflexions récentes de Gisèle Sapiro (Peut-on dissocier l’œuvre de l’auteur ?) et d’Hélène Merlin-Kajman (La littérature à l’ère de MeToo), cet article étudie la réception du récit de Vanessa Springora, Le consentement (2020). En interrogeant la polarisation des discours critiques et théoriques entre une lecture “féministe” et une lecture “littéraire” parfois présentées comme incompatibles, il pose la question du lien possible entre violences sexuelles et pratiques interprétatives. Il théorise une pratique de lecture soucieuse de contextualiser l’usage des modèles interprétatifs mobilisés dans l’analyse littéraire et de les critiquer en interrogeant les rapports de pouvoir qu’ils dissimulent. Il défend ainsi l’hypothèse que le mouvement #MeToo invite les littéraires à réévaluer leurs pratiques et leurs paradigmes de lecture en fonction de ce qu’ils rendent possible.

Globally, video games are a $152 billion industry, and approximately 3.1 billion people, or 40% of the population, are players (Ingersoll & Anti-Defamation League, 2019, Price, 2020). Gaming is a huge industry, and it’s only getting bigger. Unfortunately, women and other historically marginalized groups often face staggering levels of harassment and violence in these communities. This report aims to explore the issue of gender-based violence in video games by analyzing contributing factors and proposing gaming company interventions.

Review: Cooperative Gaming: Diversity in the Games Industry and How to Cultivate Inclusion, by Alayna Cole and Jessica Zammit. 2020. CRC Press. xv + 95 pp.

This paper argues that stand-up comedy produces the places it uses in the city of Mumbai as “safe” for new middle-class women by excluding Dalit and working-class people who are deemed “dangerous.” Such exclusion is achieved by mobilising places and infrastructure that are built to make Mumbai a “world-class” city, a process that requires the dispossession and exploitation of the masses from which the new middle-class benefits. In the context of the sexual harassment charges that hit the stand-up comedy scene in 2018 and the responses to those charges, I posit that stand-up comedy is a site where “appropriate” gender hierarchies are formulated in the pursuit of “global Indian-ness.”