The Labor of the Sabines
Why We Need Art to Theorize Sexual Violence
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2230249 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Michael Dango (Rice University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 119-144 |
| Publication date | 2024-09-01 |
| 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 | 10.1086/731627 |
| OpenAlex | W4403671681 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 21 |
Circa 1975, radical feminists theorized rape as an issue of gender, not just crime, by centering the stories of acquaintance and family rape that had been neglected by a law-and-order focus on stranger rape. For 2075, we need once more to expand the cultural repertoire of rape stories in order to better understand the larger structures that incubate rape, this time centering stories of state violence that politicize it as an issue of racial capitalism. These stories include such uncounted events of sexual violence as prison rape, strip searches at border control, and forced sterilization in ICE detention. Attending to these stories exercises an art historical way of knowing that disrupts the state monopoly on rape knowledge, whether in its legal prerogative to define what rape is or in its public health prerogative to count where and to whom rape happens. This essay begins by recovering the aesthetic instincts of 1970s radical feminist work, then complicates its racial and transnational dimensions to articulate an abolitionist movement against rape grounded in cultural transformation. Acting as examples and as theories in their own right, threaded through the essay are readings of three art-historical episodes devoted to the Rape of the Sabines: Nicolas Poussin in the colonial 1600s, Pablo Picasso and the decolonial moment of the 1960s, and Andres Serrano and the neocolonialist moment of the neoliberal 1990s. This colonial history brings out the structural function of rape to conscript labor. And it foregrounds an anti-rape strategy adapted from labor’s toolkit: the strike
Criminology · Sexual violence · Sociology · Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Law in Society and Culture
Sexual harassment of working women
Golden Gulag
Invisible visits
Rape as an Essentially Contested Concept
Reckoning with Slavery
Against Our Will. Men, Women and Rape
The Sexual Victimization of Men in America
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
Native American Women and Coerced Sterilization
The Indian Health Service and the Sterilization of Native American Women
No Mercy Here
Rereading Rape in the Critical Canon
Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe
Becoming Human
Family Values
Rape of the Earth
Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |