Ashley Zukowski

Sex and Sexuality

Research Paper

Visual Constructions of Sexual Violence

Introduction

This research project is two scoped in that it focuses on the culture around sexual

assault along with art being a tool for change. According to the Department of Justice, sexual

assault is defined as any type of sexual contact or behavior that occurs without the explicit

consent of the recipient. Yet, there seems to be consistent disagreement and controversy over

what sexual assault really is in American society. With recent events, such as a couple high

profile sexual assault cases and the inauguration of a president accused of multiple accounts of

sexual assault, the media and other social media platforms have been giving more attention to

sexual assault, not necessarily in a positive way. Many comments and conclusions of sexual

assault cases have been based off heteronormative discourses that often shame victims and

defend the accused. This paper will examine the question How does society affect sexual

assault and its victims? along with How can art be used to show this and make a change?

I have always been passionate about making a change for sexual violence. Maybe it

came from watching too much Law and Order SVU as a kid or from reading too many crime

novels. From wanted to be lawyer for sexual assault cases while I was in high school and my

first year of college, to changing my major to social justice, sexual violence is a key topic and

problem that I have constantly cared about. While starting this research I began to realize that

what really perplexed me about it is the culture and society that surrounds it. Before taking

social justice courses, I looked at sexual assault as a violent act and wanted to help the victims.
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After taking more classes, I have found that there are so many factors that go into how and why

sexual assault is still so prominent. Ive become much more interested in making a change in

our culture because while its great to help victims receive justice, I want a world where there

doesnt have to be any sexual assault victims.

Methods

To do this research I used an interactive art piece along with research from scholarly

articles, which will be discussed further in this paper. The art piece was done in the Anderson

student center at Hamline University on two different days for about one hour each day. It

consisted of different mannequin pieces (a leg, two arms/hands, a torso, and a head) along with

different materials in a bin and spread across tables. The participants were instructed to add

the materials (consisting of pieces of fabric, tiles, letter stickers, googly eyes, cardboard pieces,

sandpaper pieces, thumbtacks, and many markers) and any message they wanted to the

mannequin pieces, so long as it had to do with responses to sexual violence that they had heard

or experienced. After these two days, I catalogued everything that was added to the pieces into

an excel document. The sections in this document were body part and location, word/actions,

object used, and color. The purpose of documenting the additions was to have a more

organized way to analyze the responses.

The responses were more vast and numbered than I could have ever imagined. In my

documenting, I found there were a total of 79 different things added to the pieces. Many of the

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additions were phrases written on the pieces. Along with the written, there were feathers,

thumbtacks, pieces of fabric, cardboard pieces, googly eyes, and sand paper pieces added.

Some additions were expected, and repeated. Many of the items repeated were the sayings

No, No Means No, and various iterations about consent being necessary, you asked for it,

You got drunk, and dressing a certain way or wanting attention. The repetition of many of

these items exemplifies the prominence of heteronormative narratives seeping into any and all

discussions of sexual violence. Ripped up pieces of fabric, outward facing thumbtacks, a ribbon

tying the wrists together, eyes put on back of the head, and sand paper pieces placed

throughout show the effects of these dangerous narratives. Victims feel at fault, broken, beaten

down, and trapped.

The interactive art project featured so many amazing additions and went better than

planned. I will say there were some limitations to this project. One being the limited resources.

The goal of this was to have a full body mannequin, although the different pieces turned out

well. It also was a very public setting which can make it hard for people to add to if they feel

self-conscious or scared of the people around them seeing what they add.

Volunteering

I volunteered at the Womens Resource Center at Hamline University was created in

1983 by student activists. It started as a student run organization, transitioned to an office

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under Student Affairs and grew to its current location in the College of Liberal Arts. Its mission

is:

The Womens Resource Center (WRC), established in 1983, is a place for Hamline

students of all genders to work toward a socially just world. The WRC exists to: Provide

student access to resources that improve the holistic health, safety, and well-being of

women and their allies; facilitate intersectional campus education on topics of womens

health, relationships, professional pursuits, gender equity, and other social justice issues

affect women; Serve as a safe space where Hamline students, staff, and faculty can build

collaborative community and develop feminist leadership skills; promote the

advancement and equitable treatment of women on campus and beyond.(womens

resource center page on Hamline.edu)

This organization is located in the Drew Science building, room 118. It has three

bookshelves that contain nonfiction literature of all sorts for almost all areas of interest. It also

has many drawers and a table full of resources, mostly for female identifying people, though

they are open to all people. These resources include menstruation products, condoms, lube,

pregnancy tests, and samples of products donated from Target such as full sized cans of

deodorant, shampoo and conditioner packets, and many others. It also provides pamphlets

with information for all questions about sexual health and resources. It is a safe space that is

open to all people.

During my volunteering, I worked on a variety of tasks along with my interactive art

project. I helped with organization of materials, helped with displays, worked on posters and

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projects for events, tabled at Femme Rock, and put together the interactive art project.

Through this volunteering, I had the opportunity to learn about different womens (and female

identifyings) sexual health issues and different resources available to them. Also, through

conversations with my volunteer director Sam and other volunteers and interns, I was able to

expand my knowledge on many different gender related issues. Most importantly, I was able to

explore a deeper understanding of sexual violence and the culture that surrounds it.

Literature Review

Normalizing Sexual Violence is a study about sexual violence among youth that was done

from interviews of youths seen by forensic interviews at the Childrens Advocacy Center

between 1995 and 2004. Heather Hlavka examines how violence is produced, maintained, and

normalized among youth, (p.337) focusing on effects of compulsory heterosexuality. Hlavka

writes traditional gender arrangements, beliefs, and behaviors reinforce womens sexual

subordination to men (p. 339). She emphasizes that heterosexuality is compulsory because the

conventions of women and men are organized by the institution. Female sexuality is linked with

passiveness, vulnerability, and submissiveness. Male sexuality is linked with dominance,

aggression, and desire. These links are created by the heteronormative discourses (p.339).

Young people are affected by this because they are socialized into the institution and culture

that produces the heteronormative discourses. Problematic in itself (being heteronormative

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and exclusive), it also teaches and normalizes (and sometimes encourages) males to be

aggressive and have power and that male violence is customary, as too is the endurance of it by

women. These discourses are exemplified even more through the law and media as there are

blurry lines between healthy heterosexual encounters and abusive relationships. This further

blurs the line between what is considered violent and not, and between real rape, everyday

violence, and little rapes (p.343).

Some limitations to this are that it does lack data on male identifying and non-gender binary

peoples who have experienced sexual assault in any form. The study sampled 23 racially diverse

women (13 white girls, 6 black girls, 4 Latinas) but it could be more racially diverse as well.

The article Daddys Little Girls: The Perils of Chastity Clubs, Purity Balls, and Ritualized

Abstinence connects well to the heteronormative narratives discussed in Normalizing Sexual

Violence. As titled, this article discusses chastity clubs, purity balls, and ritualized abstinence

and how they negatively affect the sexuality and sexual health of the youth that these

narratives are pushed into. It is noted that compulsory heterosexuality feeds into this. Young

girls and women have the pressures of purity pushed onto them from a young age because

sexuality is seen as deviant for women. This pressure of purity is pushed through

heteronormative narratives as the idea of purity has to do with women having sex with men.

One of the important pieces in this article is the analyzation of chastity clubs. Within the

idea of chastity, men are believed to be needing sexual desires and trying to overcome that

with their minds while women are believed to need to protect their bodies from the invading

(masculine) force of sexual desire (p.120). Breanne Fahs writes The assumption that

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teenagers-particularly boys- cannot control their sexual appetites permeates the culture of

chastity clubs(p.120).

Compulsory Heterosexuality is another article that connected well to Normalizing Sexual

Violence. This article discusses how heterosexuality is forced onto people, with an emphasis

on females. Adrienne Rich explains that compulsory heterosexuality is used in the patriarchy as

a way to take control over women. She notes mens ability to deny women sexuality or to

force it upon them; to command or exploit their labor to control their produce; to control or

rob them of their children; to confine them physically and prevent their movement; to use

them as object in male transactions; to cramp their creativeness; or to withhold form the large

areas of social knowledge and cultural attainments(p.131) as products of compulsory

heterosexuality. This is a great connection to Normalizing Sexual Violence in that it expands

on the ideas that heterosexual discourse being the norm in a society causes dangerous

repercussions for the culture that surrounds sexual violence.

In the chapter Tornados Meeting Volcanos and Asking for It: Myths about Domestic Abuse

and Sexual Assault of Domestic Abuse and Sexual Assault in Popular Culture, Laura Finley talks

about the seven different rape myths that are emphasized in our society. The definition for

rape myths can vary a bit, as Finley uses three different sources to give three different

definitions, but she says the definitions all share a pattern in description of rape myths and that

is they blame the victim for their rape, express a disbelief in claims of rape, exonerate the

perpetrator, and allude that only certain types of women are raped (pg. 68). She lists seven

different prominent rape myths: 1.) she asked for it; 2.) it wasnt really rape; 3.) he didnt mean

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to; 4.) she wanted it; 5.) she lied; 6.) rape is a trivial event, and 7.) rape is a deviant event

(Finley, pg. 68).

The rest of this chapter expands on these rape myths, using examples and different

scholarly sources. Different examples from the media further prove the prominence of these

rape myths in our current society. These examples come from different pop culture areas, such

as movies, tv shows, and music, like the song Blurred Lines. It is emphasized that these

examples and myths further perpetuate the culture that surrounds sexual violence and its

victims.

The book Art and Politics; A Small History of Art for Social Change Since 1945 looks at

the history of art being used to make social changes. Claudia Mesch notes that art has been

used for social change since ancient times but this book examines the prominent rise of art

being used for change after globalization. Mesch writes that art and artists were used around

Europe and America after World War I. Art was used to advocate for State socialism by abstract

artists (like the constructivists), the productivists, the Dadaists, the surrealists, Pablo Picasso,

and Mexican muralists (like Diego Rivera) (p.4). During the Cold War and around that time art

was being used by different governments to spread their own political messages. The US used

would re-politicize art of all types to push their political goals. They were even able to take art

that was non-political and fill it with political subject matter that still has historians arguing

about the meaning. The Soviet Union and the Soviet Bloc dictated and censored art for their

political discourse, of which was socialism.

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By the 1960s and 70s art was being used to spread messages more about equality for

different oppressed groups such as people of color and the LGBT community. As a counter to

the manipulation of visual art during the Cold War, the arts that were used for social change

began to expand. Now it wasnt just paintings and sculptures that were used to spread

messages, but also performance, the ready-made, installation, site-based artworks and film,

and conceptual art. In the 1960s art was being used to change the ideology of heterosexuality

being the only permissible or recognized part of human sexuality (at least in Western societies).

In the 1980s arts brought themselves together to work in the gay-rights movement and AIDS

activism. In the 1980s and beyond, art began being used to spread discourse about ecological

and environmental causes and awareness. This comes from the environmental disaster that

happened in that time like Chernobyl(1986) and the Exxon Valdez oil spill (1989). This book

emphasizes that art has been used as a tool for social change for many decades and will

continue to be used as a powerful tool in the future.

Conclusions

From the interactive art project that I did and the sources I analyzed, it is evident that

the heterosexual narratives carried by our society negatively impacts sexual assault and its

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victims. The narratives of rape myths further blame and victimize people who have experienced

sexual assault. The art project showed that the rape myths are very prominent in our culture

and make victims feel at fault, trapped, and broken down. It was also found that art could very

much be a tool for social change. Art of all mediums is such a huge part of Western culture,

there is no doubt in my mind that the use of art is important and vital to change these

dangerous heteronormative discourses that feed into sexual violence culture.

Future Research

Sexual violence, and especially the culture that surrounds it, is an issue that I have been

passionate about for years now. I would love to continue doing research and trying to make a

change. If it I could I would want to do the interactive art project again but with some changes.

First I would like to have a full body mannequin. Second, I would like to have the mannequin

and supplies in a more private area and would want to leave it out for people to add onto

without me being there telling them what to do. I think a big limitation to the project was that

it was in such a private area which can limit the people who participate as it can be an

uncomfortable environment. Having it in a private spot without me or others being there could

open up the responses. Third, I would want to place this art project in various places. Having it

done on campus limits the contributions and ideas so I would love to put it in different places

off campuses, like a womens shelter and a business area.

Works Cited

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Fahs, Breanne. 2010. Daddys little girls on the perils of chastity clubs, purity balls, and

ritualized abstinence. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3. pp. 116-

142.

Finley, Laura. 2016. Tornados meetng volcanos and asking for it: Myths about domestic

abuse and sexual assault. Domestic Abuse and Sexual Assault in Popular Culture.

Hlaka, Heather. 2014. Normalizing Sexual Violence. Young Women Account for

Harassment and Abuse.

Rich, Adrienne. 1997. Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence. Feminism

and Sexuality.

Tauris, I.B. 2013. Art and Politics: A Small History of Art for Social Change Since 1945.

Introduction.

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