Rape of the Earth
Ana Mendieta's Defense of a Metaphor
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2229049 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Michael Dango (Beloit College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 48 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 151-172 |
| Publication date | 2022-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0097-9740 • E-ISSN: 1545-6943 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/720432 |
| OpenAlex | W4306711577 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 17 |
Feminists usually disapprove of rape metaphors because they inappropriately trivialize or inaccurately abstract the experience of sexual violence. I largely agree with these critiques. But in this article, I come to a tentative defense of one metaphor, the “rape of the earth” to describe pollution, mining, climate change, and other man-made harms to the environment. I do so mostly by considering how Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta developed her famous Siluetas earthworks as elaborations of her performances and installations of rape scenes in the 1970s. While often thought of as two different stages in Mendieta’s career, the earthworks and the rape works temporally and conceptually overlap, and her first Siluetas directly borrow iconography and materials from concurrent blood-based performances. Whereas Mendieta is often read as an essentialist for conflating “nature” and “woman,” I read the earthworks as aligning not bodies but structures of violence—environmental and sexual. My argument revises and extends an important feminist discourse on indexicality from Rosalind Krauss to Mieke Bal, Tina Campt, and Mary Anne Doane; mounts a defense of metaphoric reasoning, especially in contrast to the legal discourse that has monopolized contemporary US discussions of sexual violence; and reassess the sometimes fraught coalition between feminist and environmentalist movements
Argument (complex analysis) · Art history · Epistemology · Essentialism · Iconography · Indexicality · Linguistics · Metaphor · Sociology · Cinema and Media Studies · Digital Games and Media · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · History · Medicine · Philosophy
Black macho and the myth of the superwoman
Film Bodies
The lay of the land
Feminism and the Mastery of Nature
The Dilemma of Dualism
The Death of Nature
Where Is Ana Mendieta
The Serial Spaces of Ana Mendieta
Towards A Personal Will To Continue Being “Other
Frames of war
Ecofeminism Revisited
Peirce, Visuality, and Art
Bloody Pleasures
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,6 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2024 (4) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |