Gender-based violence: narrating womanhood through visual art

This multimodal research explores how women survivors of domestic violence conceptualize and narrate their womanhood. Through an Art-based Engagement Ethnography, it explores how 7 women who live in Casa Rifugio (Italy) — a shelter that provides accommodation for women that are escaping a situation of partner abuse — narrate their gender identity through visual art and verbal articulations. By looking at how their gender narratives relate to hegemonic discourses that traditionally place women as inferior, the research positions itself within the growing body of literature that conceptualize gender-based violence as something embedded in social-cultural power structures rather than as something merely personal and individualistic. The result of the ethnography is a written text and an exhibition. By combining art as a way to reach a wider audience and a written component that anchors the artistic practice in ethnographic fieldwork, the research aims at presenting the argument that...Show moreThis multimodal research explores how women survivors of domestic violence conceptualize and narrate their womanhood. Through an Art-based Engagement Ethnography, it explores how 7 women who live in Casa Rifugio (Italy) — a shelter that provides accommodation for women that are escaping a situation of partner abuse — narrate their gender identity through visual art and verbal articulations. By looking at how their gender narratives relate to hegemonic discourses that traditionally place women as inferior, the research positions itself within the growing body of literature that conceptualize gender-based violence as something embedded in social-cultural power structures rather than as something merely personal and individualistic. The result of the ethnography is a written text and an exhibition. By combining art as a way to reach a wider audience and a written component that anchors the artistic practice in ethnographic fieldwork, the research aims at presenting the argument that the perceptions of “what it means to be a woman” continue to shape relations of gender in Italy and elsewhere, establishing the very context within which gender-based violence can occur and persist.Show less

Leiden University Student Repository

Documents

In Collections

Gender-based violence: narrating womanhood through visual art