Aesthetics in distress: gender-based violence and visual culture. Introductory note

Abstract

Gender-based violence (GBV), a social issue that involves acts of physical, sexual, and/or psychological abuse exercised towards a subject based on her/his/their gender, remains one of the most long-standing and challenging problems of our times. From intimate partner violence to street harassment, from labour exploitation and precarity to workplace mobbing, from disenfranchisement to criminalisation, GBV is a “continuum” (Kelly 1987) that refers not only to embodied violence but also to political, legal and economic violence perpetrated against women, girls and those whose gender does not comply with the binary categories of heteropatriarchal norms, which might include men and boys. Such violence, mostly deriving from hegemonic masculinity (Connell 1987), oftentimes preys and afflicts bodies who are further marginalised by other identity attributes such as sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, age, ability and so on (Crenshaw 1990; Creek and Dunn 2011). This multilayered issue, therefore, needs to be understood beyond the simplistic dualities of female/male and perpetrator/victim, and should be taken into consideration from an intersectional viewpoint, examining socio-political power structures, systemic inequalities and norms in which GBV is perpetuated. On the one hand, the last decades have witnessed an increasing visibility and public awareness of gender-based violence, thanks to feminist, queer and trans* activism, anti-violence efforts at grassroots level, social media mobilisations, enactments of transformative justice, and the momentous shift incited by the #MeToo (Romito 2007; Boyle 2019). On the other hand, the changing façade and breadth of violence, accompanied by the intractable depth of digital communications, escalating financial precarity, worldwide political turmoils and environmental crises, ongoing colonial practices of land grab, arm conflicts and the rampant displacements thereof, as well as by the recent Covid-19 pandemic, have exposed vulnerable groups to gender-based violence in sites that are not only homes, streets and workplaces, but also the cyberspace, camps, detention centres, industrial complexes, prisons, borders, and so on. Taking into account the severity and complexity of such a deeply-rooted phenomenon which needs to be addressed, examined and counteracted further, with this special issue, we aim at providing a platform for academic, artistic and activist research that works at the intersection of Gender Based Violence Studies and Visual Culture. The visual modality has always been crucial to the perpetuation of and resistance to the patriarchal symbolic order from which sexist violence originates. Visual arts and media such as film, painting, plastic arts, comics, advertisement and design have notoriously been recognised as sites for the reproduction of GBV through the biased representation of binary gender categories, the infamous male gaze (Mulvey 1989; Oliver 2017), the objectification of feminine/gender non-conforming bodies, and the fetishization of violence. Simultaneously, the visual has, over the last half century, reached the status of privileged battlefield for cultural interventions carried out by feminist, LGBTQI+, intersectional and decolonial artists and media activists interested in confronting, and possibly subverting, the aforementioned sexist regime of representation (Slivinska 2021; Rovetto and Camusso 2020).

A violência de género, questão social que envolve atos de abuso físico, sexual e/ou psicológico exercido sobre um sujeito com base no género (Boyle, 2019a, pp. 23–25), continua a ser um dos problemas mais antigos e desafiantes do nosso tempo. Da violência doméstica ao assédio nas ruas, da exploração laboral e precariedade ao abuso no local de trabalho, da privação do direito de voto à criminalização, a violência de género é um "continuum" (Kelly, 1987). Refere-se não só à violência física, mas também à violência política, legal e económica contra mulheres, jovens mulheres e aqueles cujo género não obedece às categorias binárias das normas heteropatriarcais, que podem estender-se a homens e rapazes. Tal violência, derivada principalmente da masculinidade hegemónica e heteropatriarquia (Connell, 1995; Connell & Masserschmidt, 2005), muitas vezes persegue e aflige corpos que são ainda mais marginalizados por outros atributos de identidade tais como sexualidade, raça, etnia, religião, idade, deficiências, entre outros (Creek & Dunn, 2011; Crenshaw, 1990). Esta questão multifacetada precisa, portanto, de ser compreendida para além das dualidades simplistas de mulher/homem e pessoa ofensora/vítima e deve ser tomada em consideração de um ponto de vista interseccional, examinando estruturas de poder sociopolíticas, desigualdades sistémicas e normas em que a violência de género é perpetuada. Além disso, dadas as dimensões proeminentes (hiper)visuais, virtuais e discursivas da nossa cultura contemporânea (Agger, 2004; Hall, 1997; Rose, 2014), é hoje imperativo estudarmos o fenómeno da violência de género tendo em plena consideração as suas representações e imaginários relacionados.