European Journal of Women's Studies
 

Guest Editors: Júlia Garraio and Hülya Adak

Aesthetic interventions - including art, literature and film - have the potential to challenge, renegotiate and reconceptualise understandings of gender-based violence, sexual harassment and sexual violence. This Special Issue seeks to address the critical potential of aesthetics to (re)create the interconnections between gender, violence and sexuality, and to incite feminist activism and transformation (Altınay and Petö, 2022). The question of who speaks and under which conditions, what is said and how, and who listens, hears and actively engages remains as crucial as ever.

The Special Issue will focus on how artists, playwrights, writers, poets and filmmakers have engaged with gender-based violence, sexual harassment and sexual violence. It will also examine how audiences, activists and the public at large appropriate, interact with and respond to the aesthetics of works and narratives that deal with these forms of violence.

The articles of the Special Issue can address one or more of the following questions:

• What are the ethical implications of aesthetically representing gender-based violence, sexual harassment and sexual violence? How is ethics relevant to reading and responding to aesthetic narratives and depictions of gender-based violence, sexual harassment and sexual violence?

• How can aesthetic representations of gender-based violence, sexual harassment and sexual violence be pivotal in instigating social change?

• How do works of art, film and literature operate together with emotions and shared imaginaries to generate interest about the topic?

• In what ways can the arts potentially render legal and academic language and tools accessible and legible to survivors, activists and the broader public? How can artistic productions be used to foster debate about the meaning of justice for survivors and their communities?

• How can the arts, literature, fiction and film be appropriated by different audiences and activists with their variegated agendas?

• How do artists, playwrights, writers, poets and filmmakers navigate the legacies of colonialism and imperialism? How do such artists resist and address entrenched inequalities and historical trauma?

• What are the strategies of resistance to pervasive nationalist and/or colonial legacies of othering that artists, playwrights, writers, poets and filmmakers have employed in their work on gender-based violence, sexual harassment and sexual violence?

• How have artists, playwrights, writers, poets and filmmakers memorialized gender-based violence and sexual violence and pursued ethics of remembrance committed to the victims and the survivors of violence of the past?

• How have artists, playwrights, writers, poets and filmmakers addressed gender-based violence, sexual harassment and sexual violence in processes of migration and racialized/ethnicity-based persecutions?

• How have the arts interacted with #metoo and other contemporary (online) feminist campaigns against gender-based violence, sexual harassment and sexual violence? To what extent has autobiographical storytelling changed the terms of the debate?

• How have the arts problematized the entanglements between violence and specific norms and notions of sexuality?

• How have the arts contributed to generating more complex debates about gender-based violence, sexual harassment and sexual violence and the intersections of gender with race, ethnicity, class, LGBTQI+ identities, disabilities and notions of religious and national belonging?

• How do artistic ecofeminist interventions about the destruction of the environment and violence against animals contribute to rethinking the entanglements between gender, sexuality and violence?

All articles will be subject to the Journal's customary review process.

Articles should be prepared according to the guidelines for submission on the inside back cover of the print journal or at https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ejw

Articles should be submitted online to http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ejw by 31 October 2024.