Aesthetic interventions to gender-based violence and sexual violence

Our Special Issue “Aesthetic Interventions to Gender-Based Violence and Sexual Violence” comes out at a time of electoral gains for the far-right, autocratic appeal, normalisation of illiberal policies, genocides, and fascist takeover across a wide range of countries all over the world. In these sociopolitical processes, gender-based violence, and sexual violence have often been weaponised to demonise certain ethnic-racial groups. Those same political developments have been accompanied by attacks on women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights, and have led to setbacks in the combat for gender equality and the eradication of gender-based violence. However, our time is also one of proliferation of global initiatives like #MeToo, Ni Una Menos, Un violador en tu camino and Slutwalk, aimed at combating sexual violence and gender-based violence. The “#MeToo Effect” created “new conditions in which a multitude of stories of sexual violence could […] be heard as testimony – as truth-telling and justice-seeking” (Gilmore). Against this background, our Special Issue explores the field of aesthetics and its critical potential to (re)create the intersections between gender, violence, and sexuality, and to inspire feminist+ activism and transformation (Altınay and Petö). It contributes to ongoing debates about the ethics and aesthetics of representing sexual violence and gender-based violence through a range of original articles, essays, creative writing, interviews and reviews. These works explore how, in times of conflict and tension, artists engage with such violence, and how artistic productions circulate stories that unpack the complex power dynamics and socio-historical entanglements of trauma, gender-based violence and sexual violence. Salient questions of our Special Issue include: How can the arts contribute to generating more complex debates about gender-based violence that are ethically committed to survivors and to social change, and resist pervasive nationalist and/or colonial legacies of othering sexual violence and gender-based violence?