Content area
Full Text
CLAUDIA MITCHELL & RELEBOHILE MOLETSANE (Eds.). Disrupting Shameful Legacies: Girls and Young Women Speak Back through the Arts to Address Sexual Violence. Leiden, London: Koninklijke Brill. (2018). 345pp. (ISBN 978-90-04-37769-1)
In 1964 Fluxus artist, Yoko Ono knelt on a stage wearing an elegant suit holding a pair of scissors and invited audience members to cut off pieces of her clothing. The artist remained still and silent until she was left only wearing remnants of her clothing and underwear. This early feminist performance work was the first to address the potential for sexual violence and women's vulnerability in a public spectacle. With Cut Piece (1964) the artist was speaking to issues of women's identity and place in society: violence against women's bodies and most emphatically, women's silence.
In recent years the #BeenRapedNeverReported (2014-2015) and the Me Too movements (2006- ongoing)1 have brought the issues to which Ono alluded to in the early 1960s to far greater public attention. Claudia Mitchell and Relebohile Moletsane, in the introduction to their Disrupting Shameful Legacies: Girls and Young Women Speak Back through the Arts to Address Sexual Violence, state that it is time to lift the carpet on sexual violence against girls and young women. Their objective is to privilege young women's voices - have them speaking up and speaking back, through the arts and visual practice - to challenge situations of sexual violence. This co-edited volume is the result of a transnational study on sexual violence in Canada and South Africa. It is a compilation of seventeen essays that outlines the programs and methodologies used and created by various researchers, artists and others across the two countries. Moving back and forth between Canada and South Africa, the majority of the essays examine workshops and programming that has been done in community with girls and young women to address gender and gender-based violence. The editors draw attention to the connections between these two countries as, in both, much of the violence against women's bodies is rooted in the structures of colonialism. South Africa is known to have one of the highest rates of sexual assault in the world, with teenaged girls (12-18 years) being particularly at risk. Moreover, girls living on the margins of society because of race and geography...