Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Friday, July 7, 2017 in HART, VRC.

In her book, “Against our Will”: Sexual Trauma in American Art Since 1970, to be published by The Pennsylvania State University Press in 2018, Vivien Green Fryd, professor of history of art, examines how and why feminist artists, working from the 1970s to the second decade of the twenty-first century, represented and challenged the dominant narrative about sexual violence against women.  Fryd demonstrates that for more than forty years a key group of American artists have insisted upon ending the silence and have contributed to an anti-rape, anti-incest counternarrative, which she discusses as an anti-rape and anti-incest cycle. They live on the East and West coasts, and also in the South and Midwest; geographically dispersed, they address similar concerns with differences, in terms of perspectives, depending on their time period, racial identity, and sexuality.

Particular themes emerge—rape and incest against the white female body, rape and incest against the black female body, rape against the white and black male body, rape and pornography, and incest and lesbianism—intersecting with and contributing to the anti-rape and anti-incest crisis discourses that challenged and critiqued patriarchy in the wider social and political spheres during these years.  Fryd charts the radical interventions taken by women artists and activists (one and the same) in visual culture to demonstrate that many of these projects helped change legal definitions and social conceptions of rape and incest.  In this way, she elucidates many artists’ activist approaches to making art about sexual violence that also address issues of gender inequality, racial and economic differences, and the impact of sexism and pornography in mass media.

The book provides a social history of the larger cultural world  surrounding the two traumatic subjects of rape and incest that had been purposefully ignored within academic art history and within the culture at large.

While working on this book, Fryd served as the director of “New Directions in Trauma Studies,” the  2008-2009 Fellows’ Program at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, which examined the emerging field of trauma studies and worked to define its boundaries and enhance the field through interdisciplinary discussion.