WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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Our guest is Vivien Fryd, Professor of Art History at Vanderbilt University, and author of Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma in American Art Since 1970, published by Penn State University Press.
As part of the feminist movement of the 1970s, female artists began consciously using their works to challenge social conceptions and the legal definitions of rape and incest and to shift the dominant narrative of violence against women.
American artists such as Faith Ringgold, Suzanne Lacy, and Judy Chicago insisted on ending the silence surrounding sexual violence and helped construct an anti-rape, anti-incest counternarrative that remains vibrant today.
Second-wave feminist artists established and reiterated the importance of addressing sexual violence against women and their successors in the third wave then framed their works within that visual and rhetorical tradition. Fryd shows that this work had prepared the ground for the #MeToo Movement, but as well shows that #MeToo is the common ground on which all women walk.
Because though Fryd’s book focuses on specific artists working at a specific time, she shows how rape and incest and all forms of slavery are features of patriarchy and so-called civilization that are even celebrated in works of art, and valorized through the celebration of that art, from the Greek myths to the present day.
And take a slice of American Pie and find there “Founding Fathers,” owners of black women and children, not reasoned fully human and so available for sexual use and the reproduction of profit.
Vivien Fryd is a scholar of PTSD and herself a survivor, and this groundbreaking and timely project explores sexual violence as a discrete subject of American art with open eyes and unflinching analysis.
GUEST
Vivien Green Fryd is Professor of Art History at Vanderbilt University and the author of Art and Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815–1860 and Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe.
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The Persistence of Patriarchy: An Interview with Carol Gilligan (Interchange)
MUSIC
Joni Mitchell, “Not to Blame” (1994) Turbulent Indigo
Rhiannon Giddens, “At the Purchaser’s Option” (2017) Freedom Highway
Tori Amos, “Pandora’s Aquarium” (1998) From the Choirgirl Hotel
Peggy Seeger, “Reclaim the Night” (1979) Different Therefore Equal
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kyrie Greenberg
