Acts of Public Survival: The Role of Artivism in Exposing the Sexist-Ableist Nexus in Campus Rape Culture
Thesis
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University
By
Tess Elizabeth Cumpstone, MA
Graduate Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
The Ohio State University
2018
Thesis Committee:
Dr. Guisela Latorre, Advisor
Dr. Margaret Price
Copyright by
Tess Elizabeth Cumpstone
2018
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Abstract
“Acts of Public Survival” analyzes how community-based, anti-rape art projects on college campuses challenge the sexist-ableist rhetorical maneuvers that pathologize survivors and position them as outliers requiring special treatment. This violent rhetoric is evident in messages that have been circulated by prominent public figures, as well as entrenched in the policies and administrative responses addressing sexual violence on college campuses. The impact of such rhetoric is the perpetuation and affirmation of the sub-humanization of survivors of sexual trauma. In this thesis, I put disability studies scholarship in conversation with feminist theories on sexual violence and public art in order to highlight the interconnected history of sexism-ableism in the U.S. and the function of anti-rape art projects as artivist practices on college campuses. Specifically, I will be considering Duke University’s Breaking Out
Campaign, the University of Chicago’s Clothesline Project, and Emma Sulkowicz’s Mattress
Performance (undertaken at Columbia University). I use grounded theory and discourse analysis to interpret digital articles written in reaction to the art projects and to track three common trends in sexist-ableist campus community responses: the narrative of special treatment, the narrative of pathology, and the narrative of willful ignorance. All three of these rhetorical maneuvers attempt to shift accountability away from school administrators and perpetrators through the use of sexist-ableist stereotypes and dominant narratives. Analysis of the above articles, as well as photographs of the campaigns, also reveal that these student-driven, anti-rape art projects actively contest such harmful narratives of stigmatization and blame. Thus, I conclude that survivors and allies use collective art as a way to create activist communities, craft counter-
ii hegemonic narratives of survivorship and victimization, and expose the sexist-ableist rhetoric that administrators employ to shift accountability.
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Acknowledgments
I would first like to thank my wonderful committee members and advisors who were on board with me throughout this undertaking: Dr. Guisela Latorre of the Women’s, Gender, and
Sexuality Studies Department and Dr. Margaret Price in the English Department. This project has been living in my head for a long time, and I could not have brought it to life without your invaluable guidance and belief in my work. I would also like to thank all of my professors and colleagues in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department at the Ohio State
University, who pushed me to be a better scholar and made my time in this Master’s program memorable. Special thanks to my academic family who listened to rants, helped me hone arguments, fielded endless questions, and always pointed me in the right direction: Deja
Beamon, Saidah Isoke, and Jaclyn Serpico. It would also be remiss to not acknowledge my biggest supporters in Colgate University’s Women’s Studies Program, Dr. Meika Loe and Dr.
Susan Thomson, who started me on this path. Additionally, to my friends and family outside of academia (you know who you are): your unwavering belief in me throughout this often bumpy journey will always motivate me to reach new heights. Finally, this thesis would not have been possible without the incredible student activists, artists, and survivors who have inspired it (with a particular shout out to Neha Sharma and Dana Raphael). Your resilience and bravery is stunning and unbounded.
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Vita
May 2011……………………………………….Kenston High School
2015………………………………………...... B.A. Women’s Studies, Colgate University
2016 to present………………………………....Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, The Ohio State University
Publications
Loe, Meika, Tess Cumpstone, and Susan B. Miller. “Feminist Parenting Online: Community, Contestation, and Change.” Taking the Village Online: Mothers, Motherhood, and Social Media. Ed. Lorin B. Arnold and BettyAnn Martin. Bradford, Ontario: Demeter Press 2016. Print.
Fields of Study
Major Field: Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
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Table of Contents
Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………...... ii
Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………..iv
Vita……………………………………………………………………………………...... v
List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………...... vii
Chapter 1: Introduction…………………………………………………………………...... 1
Chapter 2: Theoretical Framework………………………………………………………………..5
Chapter 3: Methodology…………………………………………………………………………21
Chapter 4: Artivist Contestation of Sexist-Ableist Rhetoric……………………………………..29
Chapter 5: Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………71
References………………………………………………………………………………………..74
Appendix: Photographs from Anti-Rape Artivist Campaigns…...………………………………80
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List of Figures
Figure 1: 2014 Breaking Out Campaign Participant……………………………………………..80
Figure 2: Mattress Performance Collective Carry……………………………………………….81
Figure 3: 2017 Clothesline Project Shirt…………………………………………………………82 Figure 4: Another Participant from the 2014 Breaking Out Campaign………………………….83 Figure 5: 2014 Clothesline Project Shirt…………………………………………………………84
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Introduction
On April 4, 2011, the Office for Civil Rights released a statement known as the “Dear
Colleague” letter, which reinterpreted Title IX to hold all 7,000 federally funded colleges and universities in the United States accountable for meeting government requirements for sexual assault procedures (Johnson and Taylor). The following year, Angie Epifano wrote a piece for an Amherst College newspaper, detailing how she had been repeatedly failed by her institution after reporting her assault. Epifano’s statement was circulated widely and set off a wave of protests and increased student interest in their schools’ Title IX policies. That year (2012), Neha
Sharma from Duke University and Patty Fernandez of University of Chicago launched two separate public art projects at their respective universities in an effort to shed light on the sexual assault happening there. These were Duke’s Breaking Out Campaign and Chicago’s Clothesline
Project. Two years later, in 2014, Emma Sulkowicz would begin her senior thesis in the form of an endurance performance piece, known as Mattress Performance or Carry that Weight. Each of these student-led, anti-rape campaigns were founded by women of color and imbued with an artivist praxis.
According to Chela Sandoval and Guisela Latorre, “artivism is a hybrid neologism that signifies work created by individuals who see an organic relationship between art and activism”
(82). Besides a social justice lens, artivism is also characterized by community involvement that generates networks of activists, solidifies community bonds, and mends internalized violence.
Furthermore, instead of waiting for space to be provided, artivists carve out room in the spaces
1 through which they already move to craft and uplift previously marginalized narratives. At the heart of the public art projects that I analyze, this community engagement, desire to address social injustices, and creation of counter-hegemonic narratives, spaces, and networks is apparent.
For example, all three campaigns have activist origins and seek to change the campus culture and
Title IX policies at their universities. They have also inspired the creation of other artivist movements and anti-rape student groups within and beyond their home universities. Finally, these projects destabilize the common narratives around survivors which seek to pathologize, ignore, and/or frame them as seeking special treatment.
In this thesis, I will be building upon past interventions in discussions of sexual violence and trauma made by disability studies and feminist scholars. These scholars have pointed out that the material and discursive responses to people who experience trauma are often framed in academic spaces as if they are seeking special treatment rather than basic access needs.
Disability studies scholarship is also critical for understanding the response to survivors on college campuses, because it creates opportunities to think differently about bodies and minds and highlights how certain processes themselves are disabling. Additionally, a more nuanced understanding of disability and access reveals how ideas of the normate are encoded in the rhetorical frames that college administrations and community actors apply to survivorship narratives. In other words, dominant ideologies that dictate what types of bodies and minds are accepted in public spaces (and are therefore considered normate) also impact how we respond to survivors who speak publicly about their experiences.
Such a discussion of survivorship narratives is direly needed in today’s political and social climate. We have a President of the United States who is a self-described sexual predator, bragging about grabbing women by the genitals and doing whatever he wants with them. Under 2
Trump’s administration, we also have a Secretary of Education who has rescinded prior Title IX standards and met with men’s rights groups to discuss their take on campus sexual violence.
And even in the aftermath of an exploding anti-rape, anti-harassment campaign known as
#MeToo, that has rocked through the entertainment industry and set off a cascade of conversations around gender-based violence, the lack of nuance with which we, as a public, continue to discuss sexual violence is still widespread.1 For example, much of the backlash to
#MeToo (especially after feminist actor and filmmaker Aziz Ansari was accused of sexual misconduct) comes from a failure to understand sexual violence outside of stranger rape or repeat offenders (à la Harvey Weinstein). There is also a lack of comprehension when survivors do not seek to go through the legal system. This response has led to activists and survivors calling for more complex ways of understanding survivorship narratives. My analysis seeks to do just that: I hope to unravel previously held ideas of what constitutes a narrative of survivorship or assault by uplifting art-based campaigns that are already doing this social justice work. These campaigns offer us a way forward by allowing survivors to make claims that resist hegemonic narratives and come out publicly without dealing with the bureaucracy, time, and possible expenses of Title IX investigations or the criminal justice system. They are each engaging in a reimagination of what it means to come forward with a story of abuse and what it means to listen and act collectively.
In what follows, I seek to analyze how community-based, anti-rape art projects on college campuses challenge sexist-ableist rhetorical maneuvers and policies that pathologize
1 Discussions around #MeToo have also curiously left out campus survivors thus far, leaving some students frustrated, especially in light of the Trump administration’s recent attempts at rolling back prior understandings of Title IX (Harnish). 3 survivors and position them as outliers requiring special treatment. I will first lay out my framework for understanding sexism-ableism as a co-constituted form of oppression, and then illustrate how ideas of the normate function within this framework to structure both discursive and physical spaces. In relation to such spatial interrogations, I will explore how art can disrupt oppression built into public areas. Next, I will assess how survivorship narratives are limited by sexist-ableist rhetoric and policies on college campuses and how artivist campaigns address these marginalizing responses. In order to do this, I will be using discourse analysis and grounded theory to examine digital content about three collegiate anti-rape projects: the Breaking Out
Campaign, the Clothesline Project, and Sulkowicz’s Mattress Performance. Finally, in the conclusion, I will explore whether, in the result of these complexities, anything is changing.
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Theoretical Framework
In order to demonstrate the interweaving of sexism and ableism in response to survivors of sexual violence on college campuses, I will first outline the theoretical framework undergirding this imbrication. This framework largely draws on disability studies scholars who tackle an intersectional exploration of disability and ableism. Tracking the historical co- constitution of these identities, as well as fleshing out this process’s relation to the construction of the normate and its control over the public sphere, is integral to understanding the community response to survivors in institutions of higher learning. Thus, a discussion on the theoretical framework underpinning the concept of sexism-ableism and its effects on college survivors necessarily leads into an exploration of spatial politics and the public sphere as a contested space.
In this paper, I treat sexism-ableism as a co-constituted form of oppression, rather than two separate power structures. This thinking is heavily influenced by disability studies scholar
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies (1997). In this text, Garland-Thomson traces the associations of femininity with disability in psychoanalysis, medical practice, economics, feminist rhetoric, and ancient philosophy. This last arena specifically considers the work of Aristotle and is most striking in that it possibly sets the stage for all later sexist-ableist assumptions: in Aristotle’s biological text, Generation of Animals, he investigates bodily variations, classifying some as abnormal and others as normal. He contends that the female body is the first indication that a body has deviated from what was naturally intended (400-1).
Garland-Thomson reflects that not only does Aristotle (“whom we might consider the founding
5 father of Western taxonomy”) set up an ableist dichotomy of bodies, which uplifts the ideal physical body as that which is “normal”; but he also positions masculinity and femininity within this dichotomy as “seemingly neutral” and “monstrosity,” respectively (19-20). This type of duality is referenced throughout his works.
Garland-Thomson then goes on to highlight another facet of the interconnection of sexism and ableism: the everyday practices that reinforce or create disability in women. She points out that many practices associated with femininity throughout history and across cultures have resulted in altering, and sometimes disabling, the female body. For example,
Foot binding, scarification, clitoridectomy, and corseting were (and are) socially
accepted, encouraged, even compulsory cultural forms of female disablement that,
ironically, are socially enabling, increasing a woman's value and status at a given moment
in a particular society. Similarly, such conditions as anorexia, hysteria, and agoraphobia
are in a sense standard feminine roles enlarged to disabling conditions, blurring the line
between "normal" feminine behavior and pathology. (27)
So, not only is femininity discursively associated with disability, but there are also various gendered practices which reinforce this association in a material way. These types of practices are found globally and still exist today, with the key factor being that a woman’s body requires some form of “correction” in order to fit social norms and expectations. This discourse sends the message that there is inherently something wrong with women’s bodies to begin with. Garland-
Thomson’s theories of sexism-ableism thus set up an extensive genealogy of intertwined oppression that relies on a dichotomy of embodied, gendered expectations. The impacts of such a sexist-ableist worldview are reflected in responses to college survivors (especially female or femme victims) that seek to discredit them, because speaking out about sexual violence can be 6 read as a violation of gender and dis/ability norms (these discourses will be explored more in depth below).
Jay Dolmage and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson build on Garland-Thomson’s historical imbrication of disability with femininity by outlining how it has impacted the way that society views the rhetorical fitness of certain groups of people. First, it is important to note that the founding of the Western rhetorical tradition is largely credited to Aristotle, and his understanding of rhetoric as an art of persuasion remained unchallenged for centuries. Considering Aristotle’s beliefs on women (extrapolated above), one can surmise that he did not conceive of them as capable of conducting oratory. Dolmage and Lewiecki-Wilson point out that this line of thinking was upheld throughout the Enlightenment period in Europe: “one constant was that female embodiment - because it deviated from male embodiment - was figured as disabled; to be a woman was to be disqualified from civic debate” (23). This ideology underscores their concept of rhetorical fitness, which captures how only certain groups of people are seen as being credible speakers and writers based on their bodily appearance (27). We see rhetorical fitness guiding the responses to college survivors when they are discredited by public figures and personal acquaintances on the basis of their gender identity and dis/ability status. Finally, as Dolmage and Lewiecki-Wilson point out, when Enlightenment thinking placed a scientific rationale behind these rhetorical assumptions, the result was the pathologization of non-normative bodies.
This pathologization associated with disability also served a white supremacist nationalist ideology, as can be seen in the study of eugenics (30).2 Thus, ableism has been used to
2 See also Jay Dolmage’s “Disabled Upon Arrival” (2007), Mel Chen’s Animacies (2012), and Natalia Molina’s “Medicalizing the Mexican” (2006). Each develops the link between ableism and white supremacist national identity in the U.S. I will also explore this pathologizing response further in later sections of this thesis. 7 rationalize the oppression of many marginalized groups, as well as to pit these groups against each other.3
In thinking specifically about representations of, and responses to, sexual and domestic violence, the intersection of sexism and ableism is also apparent. First, in the sense that sexual harassment and gender-based violence impact different groups of women differently, women with visible disabilities may be perceived as easier targets who cannot refuse the “attention” (a euphemism for the harassment or violence that is really being inflicted) of predators. In Liz
Kelly and Jill Radford’s 1990 exploration of the minimization of women’s encounters with violence, they highlight the experience of a woman who was targeted for harassment because of her disability. This woman explains: “I didn’t want him to [come into my flat], but didn’t quite know how to say ‘no,’ after all he had walked me home and I didn’t want to seem ungrateful…
Because they force their ‘help’ on you, they expect sex or something” (44). This experience reveals how ableist assumptions inform rape culture, while also making it more difficult for harassed or assaulted women with disabilities to come forward.4 The lack of social structures in place to help people with disabilities might also encourage disabled women to stay with abusive partners (47).5
This precarity is further intensified by the way that women with disabilities are often socialized to see their bodies as objects under the “scientific gaze” (Dolmage and Lewiecki-
3 Specifically, Dolmage and Lewiecki-Wilson write that “Researchers should understand the ways in which disability is used to stigmatize almost all minority groups, how identity groups often distance themselves from disability in a bid to overcome stigmatizing without challenging the category of disability itself, how forms of oppression are played off one another, and thus how these processes actually result in reifying and keeping alive the mechanisms of derogation” (34). 4 Kelly and Radford also lay out how white supremacy impacts the experiences of women of color who are harassed or assaulted, and how homophobia alters the experiences of queer women (46; 47). 5 Similarly, different forms of institutionalized oppression mean that women of color, immigrant women, and lesbians might be more constrained when considering leaving an abusive partner (47-8). 8
Wilson 31). For example, Nasa Begum, a disability rights activist and policy analyst, explains that “As disabled women we can be much more vulnerable to sexual abuse and victimization, particularly if we have been bombarded with ideas that our bodies are a neutered object which is repulsive and inferior. A failure to recognize sexual development leaves us open to exploitation”
(81). She also points out that notions of disabled women’s undesirability or asexuality can lead to justifications of assault and harassment and make it more difficult for these women to be believed by authorities (81). In this way, the historical interweavings of sexism-ableism allow us to think through gender-based violence in a more intersectional approach, which guides my insight throughout the rest of this paper even though I will be documenting different realities of the intersection of sexism-ableism and sexual violence. Namely, I will be focusing on the disabling response to survivors (both rhetorically and in campus policies) that occurs on college and university campuses.
My exploration of sexism-ableism is also inspired by the intersectional analyses of disability forwarded by Nirmala Erevelles and Ellen Samuels and their incorporation of critical race theory. For Erevelles, disability is not an objective quality that is found in the body; it is something that becomes in relation to social processes. Specifically, Erevelles points to how the process of becoming disabled was tangled in the process of becoming Black during the transatlantic slave trade. She writes: “the conceptualization of black subjectivity as impaired subjectivity is neither accidental nor metaphorical. Rather it is precisely at that moment when one class of human beings was transformed into cargo that black bodies become disabled and disabled bodies become black” (87). Samuels adds to this entangled understanding of oppression with the notion of the “mutual constitution” of race, gender, and disability, which relies upon the idea that ableism is constantly at work in moments when solely race or gender appear to be 9 functioning (3). She traces this construction historically from narratives of enslaved people escaping bondage during the 19th century to gender testing at the 2012 Olympics, pointing to both its discursive and material deployments.
The three projects that I analyze do interrupt the normative expectation that a survivor of sexual violence is white, cisgender, heterosexual, and virginal. In the photographs of these campaigns (specifically Breaking Out and Mattress Performance) we can see participants and organizers whose identities fall outside of these survivor stereotypes, thus disrupting such a dominant narrative. However, it is crucial to note that the uptake of these projects in popular media (as exhibited by the digital articles I analyzed) omits race from the discussion. So, although I discuss at times how specific participants bring their experiences at the intersection of race and sexual violence into focus through these projects, my analytical categories mirror the omission of race in the digital articles. Thus, we can surmise that despite the fact that these artivist campaigns invite an intersectional analysis of sexual violence, the popular media coverage at the time did not take up that possibility.
Finally, in order to consider the constant enfolding of disability into other categories of identity and difference, it is also necessary to explore the notion of the normate. This idea is used in disability studies to delineate the treatment of non-able-bodied/minded persons, but it is also explicitly tied to race, gender, sexuality, and class. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is credited with articulating this theory. As noted above, she points to Aristotle’s creation of a dichotomy between normative and non-normative bodies that designates the former with wholeness and discursive concealment and the latter with deficiency and a discursive markedness. Garland-
Thomson also points out that those who visibly align more closely with normative subject positions are given greater credibility and power. She writes: “Normate, then, is the constructed 10 identity of those who, by way of the bodily configurations and cultural capital they assume, can step into a position of authority and wield the power it grants them” (8). Disability studies scholars like Garland-Thomson thus bring attention to the normate in order to disrupt ideas of neutrality and expose how we structure policies around such ideas.
Understandings of the normate are also inherently tied to gender. Disability studies scholar Jay Dolmage points out that “in order for this logic of normativity to function, the male body had to remain relatively unmarked. This in turn relied on the supposed aberrancy of the female” (“Disability Studies of Rhetoric” 26). Many feminist and disability studies scholars have already noted the historical connection between the grotesque or monstrous and that which is considered feminine (see my brief discussion above).6 These understandings of women’s bodies as marked, less than, or unclean, have led to the rationalization for secluding women in the private or domestic sphere across many cultures and countries.7 So, as women’s bodies are marked for their gendered difference, so too are they marked as being disabled for menstruation, pregnancy, or being seen as less physically fit or intelligent.
This function of the normate is also crucial to understanding how colleges and universities in the U.S. thrived off of the gendering of public spaces for a long time. Women’s inclusion in these spaces of higher education was often first through all-women’s colleges, or co- educational universities with separate living and social spaces.8 Furthermore, even once coeducational practices were largely implemented in public schools across the U.S., the rationale
6 A couple of well-known examples of this are Mary Russo’s The Female Grotesque (1995) and Margrit Shildrick’s Leaky Bodies and Boundaries (1997). 7 This will be discussed further in later sections on “Artivist Contestation of Public Spaces” and “‘The classroom is not the appropriate venue to treat PTSD’: Critiquing the Narrative of Pathology.” 8 See more on this in Linda Eisenmann’s “Creating a Framework for Interpreting U.S. Women’s Educational History” (2001), Elisabeth Hansot and David Tyack’s “Gender in American Public Schools” (1988), and John Frye’s “Women in the Two-Year College, 1900-1970” (1996). 11 for separate spheres guided the curriculum and expectations for girls in primary and secondary schools, and differentiated them from the social and professional expectations for boys (Tyack and Hansot 94-5). This type of institutional bias was also widespread in colleges and universities, and, as we shall see in following sections of this paper, influences responses to female survivors of assault who are already contending with a history of gender- and disability- based academic segregation (249-50).
We also see the marking of disability itself as a sign of abjection - a deviation from assumptions of physical and mental normativity - and the consequent removal of disabled people from public spaces for so-called aesthetic reasons throughout history. Susan Schweik is one such scholar who documents the material consequences of the normate at the intersection of class and disability. In The Ugly Laws (2009), she studies the municipal laws passed throughout the
U.S. in the 1800s to remove “street obstructions,” a dehumanizing euphemism used by the media to cloak the actual subjects being removed: disabled people who were frequently without homes and formal employment (1). Collectively, these policies were known as “ugly laws” or
“unsightly beggar ordinances,” and they reveal how assumptions about normative bodies can influence the creation of public policies that attempted to make public spaces inaccessible to certain people. Furthermore, pathologization of all bodies (for raced, classed, sexualized, and/or gendered reasons) relies on ableism: Jay Dolmage and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson write that “any body subjected to the medical gaze becomes disabled to some extent, through its positioning as passive object, and through the over-signification of bodily deviation” (29). Who is considered normative in the public eye is therefore imbued with the sexist-ableist lens that has historically structured both the ways that people conceive of public space and the bodies in these spaces, as well as the policies created to uphold such beliefs. So when survivors choose to make their 12 trauma public, their claims to the public spaces of their academic communities grow more precarious and are easier to challenge due to the history of ableist removal.
Thus, when we assume that public spaces are built with the so-called average person in mind (and therefore accessible), this means that we are overlooking how they are actually materially and discursively structured for the very specific person implied by “average”
(generally white, male, able-bodied, and middle-class). In this way, people with disabilities are restricted in their physical movement through, and access to, public spaces and are often required to pass as able-bodied and -minded once access has been granted. College campuses and university spaces are structured in much the same way. As I will describe in more detail in later sections, survivors of sexual violence who make their traumatic experiences public and visible are often made to feel unwelcome because they are violating norms of able-bodied/mindedness or are pushed out of school by the very policies that are supposed to be aiding them. But, first, I will turn to a greater discussion of spatial politics to highlight the way that art can challenge oppression built into public spaces.
Artivist Contestation of Public Spaces
In thinking through the politics of spatial construction and the contestation of these politics by artivist campaigns, it is important to first lay out the history of access claims made by disability rights activists and scholars. This is because artivist contestation of public spaces also centers creating access for marginalized communities. Discussions of access are typically associated with disability rights activism and disability studies, but as I have begun to outline in this section, they actually implicate many people whose bodies have been deemed “non- normative,” such as people of color, immigrants, women, the elderly, etc. This concern for inaccessibility is apparent in the work of anti-rape activists on college campuses - survivors of 13 sexual violence on college campuses often make specific claims for accessing the physical and discursive spaces on campuses when they seek the protection of Title IX, request trigger warnings, or protest unfair policies. The community responses to these claims (interpreted as specific Title IX policies or statements made by students or faculty and administration members) are impacted by a history of viewing women and people with disabilities as not belonging in public spaces, including higher education, which plays into a sexist-ableist ideology.
Disability studies scholar Aimi Hamraie points out that the push for creating more accessible spaces was inspired by disability activists who argued that the lack of such spaces made it harder for certain groups of people to participate politically. The disability rights movement then built off this initial conceptualization of access to create universal design, which encouraged architects and planners to take the accessibility of physical spaces into account during early design processes. According to Dolmage and Lewiecki-Wilson, “Universal design, a concept borrowed from architecture, holds that one should design spaces and learning environments for the broadest possible access” (26). Attaching “universal” to “design” thus signified a desire to create spaces that would be as accessible as possible for all bodyminds9 entering them; it was an expression of hope and an attempt to minimize the exclusion of certain people.
Unfortunately, though, these goals of creating universal accessibility through the tenets of universal design have often been misunderstood or executed incorrectly, leading to many critiques from disability activists and disability studies scholars. First, the creation of accessible
9 My use of “bodymind” here draws on Margaret Price’s disability studies interpretation of the interconnection of body and mind: “because mental and physical processes not only affect each other but also give rise to each other— that is, because they tend to act as one, even though they are conventionally understood as two—it makes more sense to refer to them together, in a single term” (269 “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain”). 14 spaces has sometimes devolved into a “spectacle of access,” whereby actors are more invested in appearing as if they comply at face level than actually ensuring such compliance (Shirzadian).
For example, when considering the minimum standards necessary for architects to comply with
ADA requirements, it becomes clear that institutions could feel like their work is finished once they meet minimal guidelines, indicating that the space is now guaranteed to be accessible to all.
However, this erases the fact that every bodymind is different and has a different level of precariousness to it. So, what one person might need as an accommodation might actually make a space more disabling for someone else. Second, universal design can be used as a way to avoid talking about difference in educational spaces. The logic here is that the space is already addressing all possible differences by meeting universal design expectations or ADA requirements, so the problem is solved.
The response to the misunderstanding/misapplication of universal design goals is the disability justice movement’s practice of “collective access.” The grounding assumption of this is the need for constant dialogue, which turns access and accommodation into ongoing processes instead of one-off attempts at meeting minimum requirements. Additionally, collective access indicates that if one person cannot go, the whole group will not go. Thus, the group commits to shared accountability, in the hopes of countering the isolating effects of many built environments
(Mingus). According to disability justice activist Mia Mingus, this understanding of access also means considering what will allow people “to stay in our bodies as much as possible, take care of our disabled selves, and be part of the community that [is] coming together.”
Such an expansion of access to expectations beyond ramps and braille also includes making classroom spaces accessible to people who have experienced trauma. This development can be seen in the discussions around requests for trigger warnings as access practices and 15 acknowledgments of traumatic experiences and non-normative bodyminds in classroom spaces.
Disability studies scholar Alison Kafer theorizes that understanding trigger warnings through a disability lens reframes them to be “about making the content of the talk accessible to anyone who wants it; quite simply, it’s about accessing the material, not censoring or avoiding it” (2).
This quote indicates that the material that creates a space is not the only reason why that space might be inaccessible (which is the typical understanding of accessibility through universal design); rather, inaccessibility can also be tied to certain discourses or ideologies being circulated in that space.10
Creating accessible spaces that disrupt traditional ideas of normative bodies and needs is also closely tied to critiques of the public/private divide. This ideological divide structures societies around the notion that public and private spaces should be separated for use by different people. Materialist feminists uplift this divide as leading to unequal and gendered economic and political outcomes, and women of color feminists have long pointed out that the way that women experience this divide is not monolithic. Part of access concerns for people with disabilities, women, and survivors of sexual violence, is considering how to overcome the legacy of the public/private divide. In other words, if we can see how women and people with disabilities are not supposed to be in the public sphere in the first place, this might help us understand why people perceive their access claims as “special treatment” narratives rather than civil rights concerns.
The public/private divide was initially critiqued by mainstream feminists as being a central mechanism for upholding unequal power relationships between men and women. For
10 This conversation will be revisited below when I analyze the deployment of the narrative of special treatment on college campuses. 16 example, Evelyn Nakano Glenn traces a history of the increased division of labor and distinction of private and public spheres under capitalist practices in Europe. She writes that “During the nineteenth century… a specialization developed, whereby women were assigned almost exclusive responsibility for household consumption and reproduction and men were allocated responsibility for publicly organized production” (88). However, she utilizes insights from the colonial labor system to uplift how working class women, women of color, and immigrant women were impacted differently by this supposed distinction between public and private sphere
(102). For instance, many of the women in these groups were expected to work outside of the home or did so out of necessity. African American Studies scholar Hazel Carby also notes that having access to the public sphere altered patriarchal expectations for Black women: Black mothers needed to be both financially independent and the dominant caregiver, which was necessitated by the structural economic positioning of Black male and female earnings (113).
Social policy analyst Ruth Lister adds to this by problematizing the idea of truly separate and impermeable public and private spheres. She writes:
The descriptive claim of the private family, unsullied by state regulation, within which
women are confined and from which men, who instead inhabit the public realm, are
absent is a distortion. The reality is more complex: direct and indirect state regulation of
the family; easy male passage between private and public spheres and the, albeit more
difficult, entry of growing numbers of women into the public. (120)
So, not only has the separation between public and private never actually existed as impermeable, but, as noted above, certain groups of women have never been afforded access to
17 privacy/the private sphere, such as homeless women, women with disabilities, and women who require state assistance (122).11
Upholding a separation between the public and private spheres, despite evidence to the contrary, impacts survivors of gender-based violence, because it reinforces the notion that what happens in the private or domestic sphere should not be brought into the public, that it is not severe or political enough to be an issue of public concern. This ideology silences survivors of sexual and domestic violence and allows rape myths to flourish, especially those concerning the rate of gender-based violence, who perpetrators and victims are, and what constitutes these acts of violence.12 Survivors who do speak up can also be easily dismissed by the same stroke, since
“there is still a reluctance among many states to recognise such violence and other infringements of bodily integrity as human rights violations” (Lister 121).13 Lister points out that
some men would like to keep from public view the issue of domestic violence or marital
rape. In other words, it is not only public institutions that have tried to define as ‘private’
that which it has been in women’s interests to define as matters of public concern.
Definitions and boundaries of public-private, and the ability to enforce them, reflect
gendered power relations in both public and private spheres. (121)
Furthermore, as many scholars on gender-based violence point out, the enactment of such violence in the domestic sphere is informed by cultural representations and legal understandings
11 Domestic workers further blur boundaries between public and private, as well as discussions about the policing of women’s access to bodily integrity and reproductive rights (123; 125). 12 It also means that more survivors choose to speak to family, friends, or doctors after experiencing gender-based violence, because each of these outlets allows the violence to remain private (with the doctors seen as being bound by doctor-patient confidentiality) (Morris and Lyon 219). 13 This tendency towards minimizing survivors’ claims or dismissing them as lies will be explored further in later sections of this thesis. 18 in the public sphere.14 So, notions of rape culture and toxic masculinity that lead to the enactment of gender-based violence permeate both public and private spaces, rendering a distinct boundary between the two meaningless.
Feminist scholar Guisela Latorre builds off of this interrogation of spatial politics in her book, Walls of Empowerment (2008). In it, she argues that creating and displaying art in public areas impacts the meaning of these spaces and challenges the oppression built into them.
Specifically, Latorre highlights how Chicana/o muralists in California use art to establish their right to space by invoking Aztlán, the historical northern homeland of the Aztecs. She writes:
“Not only did Aztlán, as a concept, contest the categorization of Chicanas/os as an invariably immigrant community, it also provided them with a physical and symbolic space that had previously been denied to them by official U.S. histories” (14). Thus, Chicana/o public art contests hegemonic, xenophobic historical narratives. Similarly, for many anti-rape artivist projects, simply existing in public spaces and forcing passers-by to acknowledge their painful experiences is a powerful counter-hegemonic action.
Furthermore, artivist campaigns are sometimes accompanied by performance art or spoken word poetry, such as at the closing remarks for the University of Chicago’s 2016
Clothesline Project. In writing about mural dedications, which feature similar elements of performance, Latorre notes that the function of this dedication is to enact “a symbolic ‘takeover’ of the immediate area where the mural is located” (142). Placing art which features the words and experiences of survivors directly in the public eye, on campus spaces which can themselves represent a threat to survivors, is also an act of “symbolic takeover,” a reclamation of the spaces
14 See Kelly and Radford (1990) and Morris and Lyon (1996). 19 from which acts of violence have attempted to oust victims. This act can then be understood as an artivist response to expectations of silence, of which the student activists are well aware.
Sydelle Keisler, a co-director of the Clothesline Project, notes that “The university and perpetrators don’t want stuff up… Survivors are told not to talk about it, especially not publically” (Levitt). This trend of claiming space for survivors is common across all three artivist campaigns, and refutes sexist-ableist policies and rhetoric that seek to silence, remove, or hide victims of sexual violence.
In the next section I seek to understand how my materials, as artifacts of activism, expose and interrogate the co-constituted sexism-ableism at work in responses to survivors from their campus communities, including university administrators, classmates, and media coverage. I will first provide a quick description of each project, accompanied by necessary background information on their impetus for creation. I will then outline my methods of analysis that allowed me to analyze the digital datasets I compiled and the oral history interviews I conducted.
20
Methodology
In undertaking the data analysis for this thesis, I collected the following materials: twelve digital texts about the Breaking Out Campaign, ten on the Clothesline Project, and fifteen featuring Emma Sulkowicz’s Mattress Performance. The texts that I analyzed for the first two campaigns listed are all that exist at the time of writing. However, there were many more texts on the internet concerning Sulkowicz’s campaign. Thus, I had to meaningfully delimit my overview of digital content on Carry That Weight to only include articles that focused on her performance (rather than a brief mention). In addition to the texts I examined about the Breaking
Out Campaign, I also conducted two oral history interviews. I will now briefly explore each of these projects to provide the reader with background information on their formation and various components, and follow this with an exploration of my research methods.
Materials: Artifacts of Artivism
The Breaking Out Campaign “was founded at Duke University by Develle Dish (Duke’s feminist publication) writer Neha Sharma in 2012” and based on Grace Brown’s Project
Unbreakable (“Breaking Out”).15 Similar to Brown’s project, Sharma requested submissions of statements made to survivors on Duke’s campus about their assaults and then photographed participants holding posters with the quotes written on them. Participants were given creative freedom in deciding how and where to pose, so some chose to cover their faces to remain
15 Project Unbreakable was started in 2011 to allow survivors of abuse and gender-based violence to share their experiences online. Since then, it has traveled to various college campuses (Project Unbreakable). 21 anonymous. Some images are also accompanied by additional text captions, which were written by the participants. These captions are displayed digitally on the group’s Facebook page, as well as in some of the articles I analyzed. However, not every iteration of the campaign includes captions - I could only find captions for the 2015 and 2016 campaigns. Additionally, I was only able to access images from the 2012, 2014, 2015, Fall 2016, and 2016 campaigns; images from the 2013 campaign were not available online. These pictures were initially exhibited in a building on campus, as well as a digital article posted to Develle Dish’s website. Duke’s
Breaking Out Campaign therefore occupies space in the digital public as well as in the physical public. Furthermore, as noted in the original artist’s statement, the project was created in
“response to Duke’s new sexual misconduct policy, which reduces the statute of limitations for sexual assault on campus from two years to one” (Sunhay). This quote couches the art as a politically charged, social justice action.
The University of Chicago’s Clothesline Project has also been a recurring presence on campus since its inception in 2012. This project was started in response to Angie Epifano’s exposé on sexual violence at Amherst College. The University of Chicago itself has a sordid history of covering up or overlooking sexual violence, one which Patty Fernandez decided to illuminate when she created the Clothesline Project.16 Fernandez based her artivist action on the national movement by the same name that began in the 1990’s to draw attention to gender-based
16 After a student-led investigation into the school’s policies in 2012 and the filing of a discrimination complaint in 2013 over a mishandled report of sexual assault, the Department of Education opened an investigation on the University of Chicago (Bauer). In addition to this, in 2014, the now famous Hyde Park List was published on Tumblr, which incited a hate-filled response from a hacker group, called the UChicago Electronic Army. Among other things, these hackers threatened to assault survivors and other anti-rape activists (specifically Olivia Ortiz, who they named and identified with a photograph) if they continued to speak up (Levitt). 22 violence broadly.17 She wanted the branch at University of Chicago to be specifically focused on sexual violence, whereas the original nation-wide one also includes domestic violence. Since
2012, the branch at the University of Chicago has collected and displayed hundreds of hand- painted t-shirts depicting the words and experiences of survivors. These shirts are then strung up on clotheslines in public spaces on campus, often an outdoor courtyard, but sometimes inside of an academic building, as well. Some of the shirts are accompanied by an attached sheet of paper with written explanations of the work or additional details of the assault or recovery experience.18 Each year, there is also a closing ceremony, in which survivors, participants, and organizers can speak out. This project has established itself as a consistent, anti-rape activist presence, helping to spur administrators on in the process of rebuilding the school’s sexual misconduct policy (Levitt).
Emma Sulkowicz created her Mattress Performance (also known as Carry That Weight) to fulfil her senior thesis in visual arts and call attention to her experience with sexual violence while a student at Columbia. This endurance performance piece consisted of multiple parts: according to her professional webpage, Sulkowicz lists her studio wall painting, performance, public response, diary, and objects (“one mattress, multiple waterproof mattress covers, a pair of winter gloves, and other related artifacts/ephemera”) as constituting the full piece (Sulkowicz).
Some of the rules of engagement included needing to carry the mattress any time she was on campus, and not being able to ask for help, but being able to accept help offered. In total,
Sulkowicz’s thesis performance lasted over eight months, from September 2, 2014, to May 27,
17 The national Clothesline Project has inspired numerous branches at universities across the U.S. For more information, see Patricia Hipple’s “Clothing Their Resistance in Hegemonic Dress” (2000). 18 I was unable to read any of the written documents accompanying the t-shirts. Additionally, there were many t- shirts in the online albums that I was unable to read, due to the quality or structure of the photograph. 23
2015, when both she and her alleged rapist graduated. This time period was meant to emulate a pregnancy, signaling how she aimed to take a traumatizing experience and create something beautiful or productive out of it (Battaglia). Throughout this time period, Sulkowicz and her performance received unbelievable levels of diverse media attention. Since I was unable to be on Columbia’s campus to witness her work firsthand, I chose to analyze photographs of, and digital texts written about, her performance (also true of the other two projects above). This process of analysis is detailed more below.
Methods of Analysis
I began this study with four research questions in mind. My central question asked how the art projects I am analyzing challenge sexist-ableist rhetorical maneuvers, which position survivors as seeking special treatment and guaranteed safety in public spaces on college campuses. In asking this question, though, I was also inquiring:
1. What rhetoric dismisses survivors on college campuses, and what language can be used
to challenge such dismissal?
2. What words do survivors and allies use when engaging in these projects, and how do
their communities respond?
3. What is it about public art that lends itself to activism and the creation of counter-
narratives?
In summary, I wanted to determine how the narratives that emerged from these projects complicated dominant discourses of survivorship and assault. Although I initially sought to apply these questions to a strictly rhetorical analysis of statements made by college and university administrators, I soon realized that such sexist-ableist rhetoric was embedded in policy decisions and replicated by other members of the campus community, like students and faculty 24 members. This expansion also allows me to consider how the projects situate themselves within the campus community more broadly, interacting with both rhetorical and policy responses to survivors.
Upon beginning the research process for my thesis, I first undertook a comprehensive media search for each artivist project. The articles I considered are featured in a wide variety of digital news sources, from national-reaching to university-specific. They also range in terms of their interpretation of the artivist campaigns: some are sympathetic, many seek neutrality, and others are critical. Many include interviews from participants or organizers, as well as pictures of the projects themselves. Altogether, I analyzed thirty-seven digital articles and web pages that talk specifically about the artivist campaigns: twelve in reference to the Breaking Out Campaign, ten on the Clothesline Project, and fifteen about Sulkowicz’s Mattress Performance. The first two campaigns had significantly less of a digital presence than Sulkowicz’s; in fact, the twenty- two articles I analyzed for those two artivist projects were all of the digital content I could find.
In order to meaningfully delimit the explosion of information and opinions about Carry That
Weight online, I chose articles primarily about the performance, rather than ones that briefly mentioned it. In fact, before settling on the fifteen articles I coded for the Mattress Performance,
I read through forty-one digital pieces referencing Sulkowicz’s work.
Once I established my datasets, I utilized discourse analysis and grounded theory to guide an open-coding sweep through each of the three datasets. As I read, I took note of anything that seemed of interest or relevance to my project, while also paying attention to the rich features and patterns that formed, following Ellen Barton’s theory of rich feature analysis. This type of analysis is characterized by “linguistic features that point to the relation between a text and its context. Rich features have both linguistic integrity (i.e., they can be defined, categorized, 25 coded, and counted) and contextual value (i.e., they can be connected to matters of meaning and significance)” (23). In this case, I was connecting the digital articles to the larger context of rape culture in the U.S. and the specific ways that it plays out on college campuses. I noticed, for example, that many of the responses to the survivors could be categorized in three different ways: that the survivor was lying or exaggerating to get special treatment, that they were not capable of being on campus and needed to seek medical help elsewhere, and/or that the school was already handling any sexual violence on its campus. These three trends fit within a larger narrative of sexism-ableism and exemplified the way it played out in spaces of higher education.
Upon completion of the initial open-coding sweep, I revisited my notes to construct categories for further investigation. Following Sharan Merriam’s guidance on the creation of categories in qualitative research, I sought to group the data in ways that reflected patterns, as well as “the purpose of the research. In effect, categories are the answers to your research question(s)” (183). Thus, I noticed the formation of seven categories in relation to the rhetoric being deployed by participants, organizers, and digital content creators:
the deployment of the terms “survivor” and/versus “victim,”
the framing of the decision to use art to center survivors’ narratives,
the juxtaposition of silence and voice,
the framing of healing,
the creation of counter-hegemonic alliances,
the response from various communities (campus, national, digital),
and the focus on institutional accountability.
26
When re-coding for each of these seven categories, it became more apparent how the narratives that emerged from these artivist projects complicated dominant discourses on assault and survivorship. Taken together, these seven categories provided ample evidence that the Breaking
Out Campaign, Clothesline Project, and Mattress Performance functioned as unique platforms for victims of sexual violence to share their nuanced narratives of survivorship. Their complex stories of traumatic experiences refute sexist-ableist assumptions apparent in dominant narratives on college campuses, which I organize into the three groupings uplifted above: the “special treatment” narrative, the “willful ignorance” narrative, and the “pathology” narrative.
In addition to the above media analysis of digital articles as primary sources, I also reached out to all three artivist campaigns via their public email accounts to conduct oral history interviews. Historian Penny Summerfield defines oral history as a practice that “enables the study of subjective constructions of the self and others through spoken narratives” (48). In this sense, instead of the researcher asking the subject pointed questions, the subject is allowed to tell their personal history as they see fit. I sought to emulate this method by allowing the participants to guide the conversation, to explore the experiences they thought were most important to uplift.
My goal was to contact past or present organizers or participants who were open to discussing what it was like being a part of these artivist projects. Even though I only received responses from participants and organizers of the Breaking Out Campaign, these conversations were extremely helpful in filling several gaps in the existing literature. For example, none of the digital articles on Duke’s campaign outline the relationship between the artivist project and the campus community (as opposed to articles on the other two campaigns). Speaking with founder
Neha Sharma and participant/organizer Dana Raphael was therefore instrumental for learning
27 about this previously overlooked relationship, among other things. I then triangulated the information from their accounts with the data I had already collected on Breaking Out.
In the next section I will investigate how each of the above sexist-ableist narratives are deployed on university communities in response to campus survivors, as well as how the three artivist campaigns challenge these dominant ideologies through the creation of counter- hegemonic narratives, spaces, and alliances. I will begin with the narrative of special treatment, work my way through the narrative of pathology, and finish with the narrative of willful ignorance. These subsections will all include an explanation of what constitutes the narrative at hand (as illustrated by specific examples occurring at each of the three institutions of higher learning) and an analysis of the strategies of resistance that are being deployed by the Breaking
Out Campaign, the Clothesline Project, and the Mattress Performance.
28
Artivist Contestation of Sexist-Ableist Rhetoric
“To Be Special Is To Be a Snowflake”19: Critiquing the Narrative of Special Treatment
The “special treatment” narrative so often employed by sexist-ableist regimes is perhaps best illustrated by the recent discussions surrounding trigger warnings in academia. According to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN), survivors of sexual violence are more likely to suffer from PTSD and depression (“Victims of Sexual Violence”). These kinds of mental disabilities can often be “triggered,” or activated, by distressing material that reminds the survivor of the event which caused trauma.20 The practice of using trigger warnings originated in, and has long been used in, online spaces (Simpkins and Orem). Anti-rape activists are thus moving these URL practices to IRL (“in real life”) requests by advocating for the use of trigger warnings in classroom spaces where distressing material might provoke retraumatization. On academic campuses, the movement to include trigger warnings in classrooms was spearheaded by student activists and gained mainstream media attention in 2014 when students at Oberlin
College attempted to require professors to include trigger warnings in their syllabi (Flaherty).
This initiative was rejected by the Oberlin professors, and the American Association of
University Professors followed suit, writing a statement decrying trigger warnings as a “threat to academic freedom” (“On Trigger Warnings”).
19 From Yergeau’s 2014 address, “Disable All the Things.” 20 According to Angela Carter, “To be triggered is to mentally and physically re-experience a past trauma in such an embodied manner that one's affective response literally takes over the ability to be present in one's bodymind. When this occurs, the triggered individuals often feel a complete loss of control and disassociation from the bodymind. This is not a state of injury, but rather a state of disability.” 29
The pushback to trigger warning requests is based on the concern that students would use them to avoid doing work or to get professors in trouble for forcing them to read or discuss material that makes them uncomfortable. As the media took up this academic debate, it drew connections between student requests for trauma awareness in classrooms and student-led protests of racial injustices on college campuses. Ultimately, the narrative became that of “the snowflake generation,”21 who emphasize political correctness and are prone to complaining and being offended - dismissive ideologies historically thrown at marginalized groups to silence their very real concerns (Tait).22 According to disability studies scholar Angela Carter, this
“pervasive misconstruction of trauma is rooted in ableist logics, and as such the institutionalized responses stemming from such reasoning only further perpetuate ableist structures of inequality.”
However, the sexist-ableist understanding of women and disabled students as being illogical or unfit for academia occludes university administrators and faculty members from comprehending this goal of access.
Expanding the discussion around requests for trigger warnings in academic spaces to include a critical disability studies conceptualization of access is more productive. As I previously discussed in my section on theoretical frameworks and spatial politics, Alison Kafer is one such scholar who frames trigger warnings through a disability studies lens. In doing so, she acknowledges the possible presence of traumatic experiences and non-normative bodyminds in classroom spaces, and the fact that “inaccessibility—the inability to be in a space—might stem… also from the content of the event” (3). Angela Carter also indicates how ignoring a
21 This term appeared first in British writer Claire Fox’s I Find that Offensive! (2016), when she analyzed Yale students’ reactions to the racial insensitivity of certain Halloween costumes. 22 Slate even named 2013 “The Year of the Trigger Warning,” because of how widespread the term and the controversy surrounding its utility became (Marcotte). 30 student’s claims of trauma can have severe material consequences. Specifically, she points to several studies which show that “students with mental disabilities are more likely to drop out of college than their peers” and that the biggest cause of these students dropping out “is the struggle to receive the institutional accommodation and support” they require.
Even though artivist projects like Duke University’s Breaking Out Campaign do not specifically or solely address trigger warnings, they expertly challenge the idea behind the trigger warnings backlash: the notion that people who are publicly claiming traumatic experiences are only doing so for attention and the desire to receive special treatment. Additionally, the deployment of the special treatment narrative is evident outside of the struggle over trigger warnings. For example, the most obvious way that this narrative was exemplified in the digital articles and images I analyzed for Duke’s Breaking Out Campaign was in the stories shared by the participants. The structure of the campaign is based on asking participants to “only write down something someone else had said” (Sharma). Thus, the artwork centers on responses to survivors, which reveal the way sexist-ableist rape myths inform interactions with victims of sexual assault. For instance, one participant’s caption from the Fall 2016 campaign states:
“Sometimes, your sorority tells you that stress due to working with sexual assault survivors is not an excuse for missing mandatory events. ‘Everyone in this organization is involved in at least two campus activities, and we can’t treat yours any differently.’ As if tutoring chemistry could trigger latent PTSD” (Breaking Out). Another participant’s poster from this campaign reads: “‘I think you cheated on your boyfriend and are trying to call ___ a rapist to cover it up' - the first
31 person I told one of my best friends” (Breaking Out).23 Both of these responses demonstrate how the Duke community assumed that the survivor in question was only claiming victimhood because it would benefit them in some way, whether that is having less sorority obligations or getting away with being unfaithful to their partner. Instead of hearing the survivor’s narrative of trauma and request for recognition, these community members are caught up in the dominant rape myth of the survivor or disabled person as duplicitous, as conning the system. Thus, the structure of Breaking Out creates a platform for participants to share community responses that mirror the special treatment narrative and, by doing so, calls out the existence of such a narrative.
Furthermore, organizers situate Duke’s Breaking Out Campaign within a feminist anti- rape artivist genealogy by frequently crediting Grace Brown’s Project Unbreakable as the inspiration. For example, during my oral history interview with Breaking Out founder, Neha
Sharma, she referred to the first year of the project as “an homage to Project Unbreakable” and as Duke “participating in Brown’s project as a collective.” She also frequently spoke of Brown’s
“genius” in creating the format that Duke would follow closely, which requests participants to share quotes other people had said. Repeatedly tying Breaking Out to another campaign that was already nationally recognized legitimates their artistic and activist work and uplifts the epidemic nature of sexual violence. It reveals that sexual violence is so common that there can be multiple projects existing contemporaneously to address the same issue, and yet still there are more survivors each year who are interested in participating across the country and world. This
23 In total, there are six participants in the images to which I had access who reveal how members of the Duke community perpetuate the notion that survivors speaking publicly about their assaults are trying to get some form of special treatment. 32 legitimating tactic is a direct response to the discourses that characterize survivors who speak out publicly as disgruntled individuals seeking special treatment or attention.
Additionally, speaking out or breaking silence are uplifted in these campaigns as integral to the healing process and to challenging rape culture and dominant rape myths, which further displaces the special treatment narrative. First, this is evident in the fact that many participants spoke about the importance of breaking silence as part of claiming a survivor identity and recovering from trauma. One 2015 participant of the Breaking Out Campaign holds a sign saying “No more silence. No more shame” (Janardhan). This participant has opted to show her face, and stand with feet wide, body squared to the camera, and a determined look on her face.
Her body language and positioning reflect the conviction in her poster’s message. For her, silence goes hand-in-hand with shame and also includes remaining anonymous (this is not true of all the participants though; many of whom claim voice and still hide their identities). This participant is gesturing towards the crux of why telling your story, breaking the silence, or claiming voice are considered so important to both the healing process and challenging rape culture: often, survivors of gender-based violence are not believed when they speak out about their experiences afterwards, or when they resist or do not consent to such violence in the first place (these two common occurrences of not being heard are at the core of the Breaking Out
Campaign, which specifically seeks to exhibit harmful rhetoric aimed at victims). So, being given a platform and being heard can be very therapeutic in the way that it counters damaging rhetoric.
Another 2015 participant’s image is accompanied by a caption that states: “As a Black woman, I am often told to be silent and to bear my pain. I refuse to bear it any longer”
(Janardhan). This statement points out that expectations of silence in the aftermath of sexual 33 violence are not only impacted by sexism-ableism but also racism. So speaking out for this participant is about addressing the racialized history of sexual violence in this country, as well as racist ideologies that expect Black women to be silent about experiencing such violence in order to uphold white supremacy as much as patriarchy. This participant’s experience is further bolstered by a study done by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, which shows that Black women experience higher rates of sexual violence than women in general: “More than 20 percent of Black women are raped during their lifetimes” (Green). In addition to higher rates, the
INCITE! website points out that
women of color who survive sexual or domestic abuse are often told that they must pit
themselves against their communities, often portrayed stereotypically as violent, to begin
the healing process. Communities of color, meanwhile, often advocate that women keep
silent about the sexual and domestic violence in order to maintain a united front against
racism. (“Dangerous Intersections”)
In institutions of higher learning, this intersection makes it more difficult for students of color who have been assaulted to come forward with their experiences. For example, anti-rape activist
Chardonnay Madkins notes that Black female survivors who have been assaulted by other Black students often feel like they should not report, because of the rhetoric that “These are the few black men who were able to make it to college and you trying to report them is going to hinder their success” (Rosenblatt). Thus, Black female survivors are left in a precarious position where they might feel forced to choose between fighting against racist ideologies and fighting against
34 sexual violence.24 For the participant quoted above, though, Breaking Out provided a place for her to speak back to these histories of oppression and find empowerment in the process.
This notion that survivors speak up because of collective concerns was echoed by other organizers and participants in the Breaking Out Campaign and highlight the second function of a counter-hegemonic rhetoric of voice: to create community change, rather than achieve personal advancement. This community building is significant to debunking the narrative of special treatment because such a discourse relies on the rationale that survivors are trying to help themselves by exaggerating or lying. Sharma noted in our conversation that “The original impetus [for both the campaign and those who decided to participate in it] was protesting policy.
The idea was, ‘if I can help get rid of this policy, I’m willing to put my story out there.’” Four years later, another participant echoes this motivation, writing in their caption: “I hope that through Breaking Out, sharing my story will generate more nuance into conversations about consent in an ace-positive manner, and will prevent another ace person from going through the same cycles of self-blame and denial that I went through after my abuse” (Breaking Out).25
After being told that asexual people cannot be assaulted, this participant was willing to share their painful story if it meant another asexual person would avoid such rhetorical violence.
Tying the act of breaking silence or claiming voice to community education and improvement thus decenters a foundational logic of the special treatment narrative.
24 This intersection is also mentioned by a Clothesline Project participant, who notes how her experience being Mexican-American in the U.S. made her feel uncomfortable about reporting to the police and the university (Levitt). Students at Spelman College are also inserting themselves into the larger #MeToo conversation happening right now and calling attention to their experiences at the intersection of sexual violence and racism by creating an anti-rape campaign around the hashtag #WeKnowWhatYouDid (Mukhopadhyay). 25 “Ace,” here, is denoting people who fall on the asexual spectrum, meaning that they have little to no sexual desire. 35
Finally, the Breaking Out Campaign allows survivors to display a messy or nonlinear narrative of recovery or healing to confront the narrative of special treatment. 26 It reveals that just because a survivor is not “fully recovered” or is still publicly struggling, these experiences are not necessarily indicative of people looking for special treatment. Rather, this nonlinear healing path is common for people with trauma and for participants in the campaign: in the digital articles and images I analyzed for this dataset, there were eight participants who exemplified this type of healing process. One 2014 participant holds a poster stating: “I have scars that will never heal” (see figure 1) (Breaking Out). This pronouncement contradicts the notion that healing follows a clean arc toward a definitive endpoint. Another participant in the
Fall 2016 campaign writes about a conversation with a self-identified male “ally” who referred to her as unreasonable, which left her questioning her own recovery: “And you wonder to yourself, god, why can’t I be less emotional about this? But then you realize that after you’ve been drugged, pinned down, and raped, it’s difficult to approach these things with an even temperament” (Breaking Out). This quote illustrates a cyclical or nonlinear healing process, wherein various events or rhetoric can trigger the participant in ways that disrupt attempts at recovery. This participant shows frustration with herself and the healing process.
26 “Messy,” in this sense, both calls attention to the reality of living with trauma and radically challenges strictly linear narratives that reflect how patriarchal discourses often look for clear beginnings and ends to narratives of recovery. This type of understanding is influenced by disability studies scholar Alyson Patsavas’s “Recovering a Cripistemology of Pain” (2014). Patsavas explores the rhetoric around pain by considering her own experiences with chronic pain in relation to national narratives. She points out that even though we are taught to isolate and hide suffering, our pain is actually a “leaky experience that flows through, across, and between always-already connecting bodies” (213). Thus, trying to contain pain in order to heal in a linear or expected fashion is not only overly simplistic, but also often impossible. Relatedly, when I write about narratives or pathways of healing, I am understanding this process of recovery in a more nuanced way than the dominant notion of healing as linear, fixed, or even always achievable. 36
Rather than seeing these narratives as cries for attention or attempts at being pampered by the campus community, Breaking Out organizers recognize how publicly expressing grief or anger can be a pathway for healing. As Sharma pointed out to me, after the first year, the campaign was “more focused on carving out space on campus to act as a temporary memorial, to concentrate grief… taking up common, public space was a validation of the narratives and grief.”
She noted how certain forms of public grief are validated while others are not, gesturing specifically at the widespread acceptance of war memorials. Veterans of war, as survivors of a specific type of violence, are supposed to be treated with respect and honored. This attitude, combined with institutionalized modes of recognition (like Veteran’s Day, public monuments, specific financial policies meant to aid them), legitimates the trauma they have experienced. By contrast, when survivors seek to publicly mourn the violence they lived through or acknowledge the trauma they are still living with, they are met with accusations of being “special snowflakes” who need to toughen up and stop expecting preferential treatment. Sharma’s firm belief that “we need to have memorials for people who’ve been assaulted,” challenges the traditional narrative that “real” survivors recover privately and on an individual level. Instead, survivors show through their continued interest in participating in Breaking Out that healing might work best collectively and in public, and that being vocal in public does not mean a request for special treatment.27
Similarly, the Clothesline Project at the University of Chicago utilizes rhetoric around voice, survivorship, and healing to counteract accusations of victims seeking special treatment or
27 This notion of collective healing can again be undergirded by Patsavas’s (2014) understanding of pain as uncontainable and constantly leaking across bodies and spaces. Such a comprehension of pain necessitates an alternative form of recovery: one that is aware of such leakage and thus more interedependent or community-based (213). 37 attention. First, the Clothesline Project echoes the Breaking Out Campaign’s assertion that survivors giving voice to their pain and experiences of sexual violence is an act of empowerment and a part of the healing process for many, rather than an attempt to get attention. This particular understanding of breaking silence is closely tied to the way that silence or disregard is often used during or after the act of sexual violence. For example, one t-shirt displayed in 2014 says:
“...and I told him to leave… and I told him to leave… and I told him to leave… and I told him to leave” (UChicago Clothesline Project). There were at least ten other shirts (with slogans that were legible in the online images) about survivors who were dismissed or ignored by their abuser. Additionally, there were at least five shirts that expanded on the notion of silence as violence by illuminating how Title IX policies at the University of Chicago silence survivors by not listening to them, not being up to federal standards, or not being transparent about campus sexual violence. Such policy failures can be seen as a reflection of the university officials who implemented them and benefit from the silencing of survivors (which I will continue to explore below). The fact that the Clothesline Project provides a platform for survivors to protest the politics of silencing, encourages participants to use their voice as part of their recovery process.
For instance, one shirt from 2013 reads: “Breaking the silence made me a stronger woman.
Raise hell and Fuck shit up b/c rape is never ok” (UChicago Clothesline Project). For this survivor, speaking up about their experience led to a sense of recovery. Additionally,
Clothesline Project organizers collect survivorship narratives, in part because they recognize the impact that public recognition can have on participants’ recovery processes. Sydelle Keisler, a
2015 and 2016 director of the project, points out that “So many of these stories share similar threads, circumstances, or emotions. While trauma can be scary and difficult to talk about, by putting the shirts together, we hope to incite conversations that will bring people together” 38
(Huang). Keisler suggests that bringing together a multiplicity of voices with similar stories can be stronger than a single voice, emphasizing a more collective, public form of healing. Thus, speaking out is not for personal benefit or to con a system, but to move towards healing as a community.
Second, and similar to the Breaking Out Campaign, the Clothesline Project deploys a counter-hegemonic rhetoric of healing to point out that survivors do not have to be “fully recovered” or quiet about their experiences in order to be seen as legitimate. In fact, the circulation of messier narratives of recovery or of living with trauma are common among participants and survivors. For example, the current profile picture for the Clothesline Project’s
Facebook page is a close-up of a t-shirt saying, “I don’t have to forgive.” This quote shows that survivorship narratives and healing arcs do not have to include or end with complete closure, but can exhibit bumpy scar tissue or a weeping wound; that survivors do not have to take the “higher road” to be believed or supported. Altogether, I found at least twenty-two shirts that mirrored these claims. One reads: “my story has no end” (UChicago Clothesline Project). Another displays how participants themselves are well aware of the complexity of living with trauma:
“sometimes I feel like I traumatize myself” (UChicago Clothesline Project). This statement is underscored by a large target that is painted on the chest of the shirt behind the words. PTSD is a common result of sexual violence, and many people with PTSD feel heightened anxiety or hypervigilance, partially because they are constantly on alert for potential triggers. However, as this shirt makes clear, it is difficult to avoid or predict all possible triggering spaces, actions, or thoughts. The painted target on the shirt thus uplifts how this disorder can feel like walking around with a giant target on your body and like you and your mind are your own enemies.
These quotes from participants are representative of messier narratives about living with trauma. 39
They exhibit that there might not be a fully recovered state at the end of the road, that the road may in fact never completely end, that recovery is a constant undertaking (“my story has no end”). There might in fact be certain aspects of what happened that you can never “get over.”
Circulating such accounts challenges the dominant ideology in the special treatment narrative by normalizing messy or nonlinear healing processes instead of penalizing survivors for them.
Finally, unlike the Breaking Out Campaign, the Clothesline Project also strategically deploys the identity of “survivor” to contradict notions of victims lying or exaggerating to get special treatment. For example, one survivor at the University of Chicago explained that she did not come forward to report her assault, because she “didn’t want to play the victim” (Dries).
This idea of “playing the victim” delegitimizes victims of assault in the same way that it can marginalize people of color who try to speak truth to power (i.e., “playing the race card”). When people use these phrases, they are referring to the idea that the speaker is falsely or dramatically claiming some level of oppression or victimization in order to reap some personal benefit. This particular understanding of victimhood is also closely tied to the rape myth that survivors who speak publicly about what happened to them are lying, despite the statistics that show how unlikely false reporting actually is: only 2-8% of reported rapes turn out to be false (Lonsway et al.). The stickiness of this particular myth despite statistics saying otherwise compels survivors to internalize ideas around “playing the victim,” which then prevents them from dealing with or naming what happened to them (publicly or privately). Such internalization can be incredibly traumatizing in and of itself. According to philosopher Kelly Oliver, “Not being taken seriously contributes to PTSD symptoms by making women question themselves, and women suffer more shame along with feelings of helplessness” (85). Clearly, the survivor quoted above associates victimhood with attention-seeking and manipulation. When placing this observation in 40 conversation with the widespread preference for the term “survivor” by student activists, we can understand this preference as a strategic deployment aimed at distancing participants from the myth of a lying victim.
The way that Sulkowicz’s Mattress Performance was taken up by popular discourses in the media can be understood as a final case study for how sexist-ableist rape myths lead viewers to interpret survivors’ public claims of assault as pleas for special treatment. This misunderstanding was recurrent in reactions to Carry That Weight, which led many to overlook the actual purpose of the performance in favor of an interpretation that would cast Sulkowicz as making exaggerated claims in an effort to get special treatment from the university and reverse the outcome of her Title IX investigation. For example, in an MSNBC interview, Sulkowicz is asked how carrying the mattress impacted her ability to speak about the lack of a guilty conviction. She responds by saying: “It’s not a legal statement… I’m not making some sort of press statement. It’s just my artwork. It’s the same thing as if a woman drew a portrait of the rapist. It’s a personal thing that they’re doing to try to overcome what happened to them”
(Harris-Perry). This question is an attempt to force Sulkowicz to frame her narrative in a way that follows the dominant frame of survivorship. In this way, much of the coverage and discussion of Sulkowicz’s performance was hampered by “pundits [who] have begun to suggest the controversy fits a movement that, as one said, ‘romanticizes being a victim’” (Kingkade).
This language parallels the notion of “playing the victim” (discussed above). In this line of thinking, victims are duplicitous and benefit from claiming the victim identity. These long-held associations make it difficult for people to recognize the nuance in survivorship narratives like
Sulkowicz’s. At the same time, they make such complex or messy accounts integral to confronting rape myths in dominant sexist-ableist discourse. 41
If we look more closely at the counter-hegemonic rhetoric being deployed by Sulkowicz, and understand it in relation to the similar tactics used by the Breaking Out Campaign and the
Clothesline Project, her efforts to disrupt dominant narratives of survivorship become clearer.
First, Sulkowicz repeatedly positions Carry That Weight as performance art, rather than solely protest. For instance, in her first interview, published the day her performance began, she says:
“it’s an endurance performance art piece. I do think that nowadays art pieces can include whatever the artist desires. And in this performance art piece, it utilizes elements of protest, because I think that is relevant to my life right now” (Frost et al.). In consequent interviews, she continues to emphasize her role as a performer, not just a survivor or activist, to draw the public’s attention back to the fact that her work is situated in a lineage of feminist, anti-rape performance art. This counter-hegemonic genealogy of artivism is noted by many of the authors who covered Sulkowicz’s performance. For example, one writer notes the connection between
Sulkowicz and “Yoko Ono, Ana Mendieta, Suzanne Lacy, Nancy Spero, Jenny Holzer and
Tracey Emin [who] scrawled over the erotica of violence” in traditional artistic depictions of rape (Edwards). Altogether, seven of the articles I analyzed in this dataset positioned Sulkowicz in this genealogy. Not only does this genealogy reinforce the link between art and activism, but it also legitimates Sulkowicz’s experiences by positioning them in a long line of artivists speaking about the pervasiveness of gender-based violence. Similar to the Breaking Out Project, this rhetorical move also contradicts the special treatment narrative, which is based on the notion that the only reason why survivors would speak publicly about their trauma is to get attention or benefits. Instead, by pointing to a history of feminist artists politicizing sexual violence and dragging the trauma of it into the public sphere, Sulkowicz and other artivists make space for survivors to be vocal in the face of such charges of personal advancement. 42
Relatedly, considering Sulkowicz’s performance in conversation with the other two artivist campaigns uplifts the importance of collective public healing, which contradicts sexist- ableist ideas of recovery as being private or individualized and confronts the special treatment narrative. For example, in her first interview, Sulkowicz made a point to explain that even though she would not be asking for help carrying the mattress, “others are allowed to give me help if they come up and offer it. So, I’m hoping that not only do I get better at carrying the mattress, but that other people will learn about the piece, and, I don’t know… I’m very interested in seeing where this piece goes and what sort of life it takes on” (Frost et al.). From the onset,
Sulkowicz is revealing that there is a participatory or collective element to her work (see figure 2 for an example of what these collective carries looked like in action). At least five articles in my dataset noticed this attempt at framing healing as a collective and public act. One writer notes that “This participatory dimension has opened a space for the performance to take on a new and moving type of meaning, as her peers organize ‘collective carry’ events to assist, supporting
Sulkowicz’s cause both physically and symbolically” (Davis). Both of these quotes outline the importance of community participation to the logistical elements of her piece (how it functions day-to-day) and to her healing process. This latter implication of campus participation is seen in the way that community aid in carrying the mattress symbolizes collective support of
Sulkowicz’s recovery - if the mattress is meant to stand in for the assault and represent where it took place, participants are then symbolically helping her carry the weight of trauma. Such a reframing of healing challenges traditional sexist-ableist notions, which seek to create a clear and impermeable distinction between the public and private sphere, situating certain bodies and practices in each: women, people with disabilities, emotional expression, and overt discussion of sexual violence and trauma are excluded rhetorically (and sometimes materially) from the public 43 sphere. When these ideological frames are threatened by survivors of sexual violence publicly speaking about their experiences, the special treatment narrative seeks to force them back out of the public sphere by delegitimizing their claims: suggesting they are lying, not strong enough to handle the public sphere (“special snowflakes” needing “special treatment”), or hiding ulterior motives. Sulkowicz’s intentional inclusion of community participation in her endurance performance crafts a counter-hegemonic understanding of healing that challenges these sexist- ableist rape myths.
Treating survivors as constantly asking for special treatment or attention also leads to the assumption that there is something wrong with them, particularly when they are situated in the neoliberal and hyper-ableist space of a college campus. I will explore this tendency to pathologize survivors next.
“The classroom is not the appropriate venue to treat PTSD”28 : Critiquing the Narrative of
Pathology
One common rhetorical and university policy response to survivors of sexual violence is the narrative of pathology, which is predicated on the notion that the academy is an intellectually rigorous place of compulsory able-mindedness. Generally speaking, disability itself is frequently pathologized, because it is associated with a lack of bodymind autonomy. Garland-Thomson writes that “Not only do [bodies that are disabled] violate physical norms, but by looking and acting unpredictable they threaten to disrupt the ritualized behavior upon which social relations turn” (37). Further, the tense relationship between disabled people and the medical industry is due in part to how “Science, medicine, and later therapeutic discourses and practices cast
28 From “On Trigger Warnings” by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). 44 disability as a personal deficit or deviance to be cured” (Dolmage and Lewiecki-Wilson 29).
This understanding of disability is often termed the medical, biological, or individual model, with an emphasis on the problematic nature of disability and the expectation of medical cure and individualized care.29
In the institution of higher education, the narrative of pathology functions in much the same way. As disability scholar Margaret Price notes, this pathologization is reinforced by a very real “desire to protect academic discourse as a ‘rational’ realm, a place where emotion does not intrude (except within carefully proscribed boundaries), where ‘crazy’ students are quickly referred out of the classroom to the school counseling center” (33 Mad at School). In this way, trauma is set up as a pathological identity by the university, and academic administrators utilize this emphasis on necessary medical intervention to shift accountability. Usually, the university is responsible for the safety and health of its students; however, if a survivor can be labeled “in need of psychiatric help,” then they become responsible for their own recovery. The unstated expectation is for students who have been traumatized to remove themselves from the classroom, seek medical attention, and only return after they “get over it” (see my discussion of the public/private divide above). Additionally, shifting accountability is a rhetorical move designed to physically shift the traumatized person from one institution to another. In other words, by claiming that schools are not hospitals, the traumatized student becomes the traumatized patient, thus saving the ivory tower of the academy from being besmirched by any form of irrationality.
29 Disability as a pathological identifier has been deployed by various policies and policy-makers to mark certain bodies as perpetual foreigners unable to fully access citizenship (as I noted in a previous footnote). But, we can also see the use of the medical model to pathologize certain bodies in healthcare, through how the Affordable Care Act (ACA) “encodes into law the perception that it is an individual’s responsibility to maintain him/her/themself in a state of maximum able-bodiedness” (Minich “Enabling Whom?). Finally, this medicalized pathologization also relies on U.S. labor expectations and the ideology of the productive worker (see Garland-Thomson for more on this). 45
This narrative of pathology has been institutionalized in the policies of many universities.
For example, at the University of Chicago, when Olivia Ortiz (whose mishandled case launched a Department of Education investigation in 2013) wanted to take a leave of absence, she was told by the associate dean of undergraduates that she “wouldn't be allowed to return to school without medical clearance from a psychiatrist at the student counseling service” (Levitt). This reliance on medical documentation from perceived experts is given greater weight than Ortiz’s own understanding of her state of mind and preparedness. Disability studies scholar Ellen Samuels calls the process that depends on this “authoritative gaze” biocertification (17). She writes that
“Biocertification materializes the modern belief that only science can reliably determine the truths of identity… Yet in practice biocertification tends to produce not straightforward answers but documentary sprawl, increased uncertainty, and bureaucratic stagnation” (122). In Ortiz’s case, this stagnation and uncertainty is clear: she repeatedly attempted to return to school, was prevented from transferring due to her transcript, and was refused reimbursement for the semesters she couldn’t complete (Levitt). The difficulty Ortiz had moving through the bureaucratic procedures required for her to graduate - which were put in place only because she was assaulted, went public, and checked herself into a psychiatric ward during the investigation - stand in stark contrast to the lack of difficulty that her perpetrator faced, who graduated before her (Levitt). Thus, biocertification and a narrative of pathology not only prevented Ortiz from physically moving on, but also from mentally or emotionally being able to leave her assault behind, as she remained entangled in the university’s policies and procedures for survivors.
These experiences are also reflected on many of the shirts artivists made for the
University of Chicago’s Clothesline Project. For example, one shirt reads: “this university failed me and covered up my assault” (Huang). When asked about this message, Sydelle Keisler 46 pointed out how common the experience was and how she hoped that the Clothesline Project would continue to remind administrators that they were not doing enough for students, despite their attempts to comply with the new, heightened Title IX standards (Huang). There were many other shirts reflecting this frustration with the bureaucratic stagnation and pathologization that students faced when coming forward, such as one reading that “I was called crazy again and again and again and again” (UChicago Clothesline Project). Creating a space for survivors to share their experiences of bureaucratic stagnation and pathologization (which often work hand- in-hand) draws community attention to the rhetorical violence of these responses and allows activists and survivors to join together to contest this discourse.
The rhetoric that organizers and participants use to explain the function of art in the
Clothesline Project, also seeks to challenge the idea that there is something wrong with survivors, which necessitates their removal from campus: they situate the project as collecting and displaying the stories of the hundreds of survivors on campus, because there is power in numbers. Art becomes the vehicle through which counter-hegemonic stories are told. In this way, the artwork created for the Clothesline Project challenges the idea that there is something wrong with survivors on an individual level by highlighting just how many students on campus have experienced, and continue to experience, sexual violence (as evidenced by the continued interest in participating). Seeing hundreds of t-shirts stretching across and crisscrossing a campus courtyard or within a university building is a powerful testament to the sheer number of survivors who are walking through the halls and on the sidewalks of the University of Chicago.
Furthermore, the physical space that the Clothesline Project takes up on various parts of campus disrupts the notion that survivors should not be on campus, that their stories and healing processes must happen elsewhere. By being public art projects, these artivist campaigns carve 47 out spaces for survivors in response to the attempts of perpetrators and administrators to remove these students from campus.
At the same time as these projects are disrupting the practice of pathologizing survivors by carving out physical spaces for them and by pointing out how widespread sexual violence is, they are also presenting alternative narratives of healing and recovery that allow survivors to be nonlinear in their recovery without also being pathologized. For example, one shirt states: “there was no penetration/I feel like I have no reason to be traumatized, & I feel like I am more judged”
(UChicago Clothesline Project). This shirt displays the complexity of survivorship, because the writer’s inability to fit the cookie cutter narrative of sexual violence precludes them from feeling entitled to the identity of “survivor” or “victim.” The messiness of survivorship is also showcased by the sheer range of depictions and stories that the Clothesline Project puts on display every year. For example, the quote above can be read in contrast with the other t-shirts around it, which say things like “My rape does not define me,” and “I am not ashamed of what I have survived or who I have become” (UChicago Clothesline Project). Such quotes represent what we often see as a traditional healing narrative: a clear path toward recovery and a distinct idea of what constitutes assault and what happened to them.
Additionally, this messiness is also evident in the designs of the t-shirts. For example, one shirt that poses a question to the viewer (therefore disrupting the idea that sexual violence is clear-cut and easily identifiable) is gray with blue writing in all capitals. In the center of the shirt is a large multi-colored block that blurs together phrases and feelings related to the participant’s experience. The whole shirt itself is also covered with large streaks of brown (as if to indicate dirtiness) and small flecks of red and blue (UChicago Clothesline Project). This design effectively conveys chaos and confusion to the viewer. Moreover, this messier narrative of 48 healing can also be seen in the t-shirts that do not have any quotes or accompanying written explanations. The creators of these shirts refuse to give the viewer a clear and guiding narrative; they refuse to make their pain legible in the expected way. One such shirt from the 2017 campaign is covered in rips (see figure 3). Hands are painted on the shirt to look like they have caused the rips, and some are clawing their way out from the inside. In the center is a mass of black, red, and blue paint layered on top of each other. Towards the bottom is what appears to be a cartoon-like rendering of a woman, who is repeatedly drawn descending towards the hem while getting smaller in proportion as she nears the hemline (UChicago Clothesline Project). Although this shirt lacks any writing, its impact is still visceral. Refusing to use alphabetic language to express trauma represents how trauma can transcend the bounds of such language - sometimes images or sounds are more effective in representing such experiences. So, even though these shirts lack words to guide the viewer, the images themselves (or the use of a visual language) are sufficient in expressing the state of mind of the creator. Making space for survivors to challenge expected forms of communication creates room for confronting notions of what constitutes a survivorship narrative: it is an important step in opposing the narrative of pathology, because it normalizes the presence of trauma in public academic spaces and offers survivors a place to express themselves without the threat of being removed from campus or pathologized.
Similar to the Clothesline Project, Duke’s Breaking Out Campaign gives survivors a space to talk back to the pathologization they have experienced by authority figures both at Duke and off campus. The experiences of these participants also offers evidence of the narrative of pathology at Duke. For example, one poster from the Spring 2015 campaign reads: “‘Oh sweetie, rape is such a harsh word. It was a misunderstanding’ - My (former) therapist (I had been unconscious…)” (Breaking Out). It’s unclear from the poster or accompanying caption if 49 this therapist was affiliated with Duke; however, the point remains that practices of biocertification and pathologization rely on the assumed ability of medical professionals to better understand the needs and experiences of survivors than they do themselves. Biocertification as a result of pathologization is also apparent in this 2014 poster, reading: “I know of more rapists that have or will have graduated on time than their victims, who have had to transfer or take time off. As far as I know, my own rapist is still on track to receive a PhD from Duke” (see figure 4)
(Breaking Out). As exhibited by this quote (and the eight other participants who made similar claims of biocertification or pathologization30), authority figures like medical professionals and campus administrators are often unable to anticipate the needs of survivors due to already circulating sexist-ableist rape myths. It’s a vicious cycle that ends up punishing the survivor more than anyone else involved.
To refute such a narrative of pathologization at Duke, the Breaking Out Campaign physically carves out spaces on Duke’s campus for survivors. This creation of space happens in two ways. First, the pictures of the survivors holding the posters with abusive rhetoric are taken around campus, sometimes in obviously identifiable locations. Thus, survivors are shown simultaneously speaking about trauma and occupying public space. It injects them back into the student body, into the fabric of the campus imaginary. Positioning survivors as already walking among us, makes it harder for administrations to try to mark them as not belonging, as needing to find treatment elsewhere. Second, every year the campaign puts new photographs on display in a university building. Both organizers with whom I spoke, Neha Sharma and Dana Raphael, recounted the success of these exhibitions, with lots of students supporting the campaign and
30 There were also six other narratives that demonstrated participants being pathologized by friends or perpetrators. 50 showing up to the opening night of the display. This act again allows survivors to occupy campus spaces, but it also lets students support them by legitimating their presence and pain.
In addition to the images and exhibit allowing survivors to claim campus space, Neha explained to me that the purpose of Breaking Out after the first year was to validate survivors through the occupation of public campus spaces (as I mentioned earlier). But, even during the first year of the campaign (2012), when the goal was to change a specific Title IX policy, the campaign’s mission statement revealed that it was still about “a deliberate attempt at self- institution into Duke’s public narrative” (Sunhay). Thus, Breaking Out was always meant to establish space for legitimating participants’ narratives. Claiming space challenges the narrative of pathology’s dependence on an individualized, private form of healing. Furthermore, the continued student interest in this campaign and common assertion that participation is cathartic indicates that collective and public healing might be more effective for survivors. Additionally, there are examples of Duke survivors’ public presence directly benefiting the campus community. For example, one caption from Fall 2016 reads: “Advocacy work has been instrumental to my healing. By co-leading Duke Support and serving on the University’s Sexual
Misconduct Task Force, I’ve used my experience to push back against a culture that silences survivors of sexual assault” (Breaking Out). This caption refutes the notion that survivors are too fragile to be on campus and must be removed immediately for their own benefit, at the same time as it uplifts why it might actually be beneficial for the community to try to keep survivors situated and supported on campus.
Unlike the Clothesline Project, though, the Breaking Out Campaign also deploys counter- hegemonic rhetoric about voice and breaking silence to disrupt pathologizing discourses and practices on college campuses. By tying speaking out about sexual assault to collective healing, 51 the campaign refutes the notion that survivors need to relegate their trauma to the private sphere or leave campus to seek help in non-academic spaces. For example, as I acknowledged above, the initial reason for both the foundation of the campaign and for survivors to participate was the desire to heal and to change the campus community (Sharma). Founder Neha Sharma also explained to me that the direction to participants to “only write down something someone else had said” was implemented both “to preserve Grace Brown’s project” and because including quotes from other people “uplifts how as a community we dismiss survivor stories.” This strategy is especially crucial considering that Duke in Spring 2012 was post Lacrosse rape scandal, which created an “environment that was hostile to narratives of assault” (Sharma). So the campaign created space for survivors to break silence when they might otherwise have felt pressured to remain silent.
These intentions are also reflected in participant quotes. One writes in her accompanying caption that “participating in Breaking Out is me trying to reclaim this year as a year of conflict and struggle against the norms that put me in this situation in the first place. If I can't heal at my own discretion; if I have to relive that pain and confusion over and over, then I will publicly fight against the ignorance that birthed those demons” (Breaking Out). This caption gestures at the complexity of publicly disclosing experiences of sexual violence. Coming forward does not always or immediately lead to closure and a neat healing arc; it can also be traumatizing in itself.
Recognizing the possible downsides to publicly disclosing assault is an important complication, because it allows us to understand why many survivors choose not to do so, especially considering the tendency for survivors to be pathologized upon coming forward. At the same time, the caption also reveals this participant’s decision to publicly identify as a survivor in order to claim public space and use the public’s discomfort with her pain and her story as a way to 52 challenge rape myths. So, even though the act of speaking out might not make her feel better, she is still undertaking it in an effort to change the culture. By choosing to take up space despite the impact it might have on her recovery process, this survivor exercises her agency and confronts the narrative of pathology and process of biocertification, which attempt to remove victims from college campuses by characterizing them as individuals who do not know what they need.
Finally, the narrative of pathology is apparent in many of the critical responses to
Sulkowicz’s Mattress Performance. One of the most obvious examples (and also searing critiques) in my dataset, comes from an interview with cultural critic and media studies professor, Camille Paglia. She characterized Carry That Weight as a “protracted masochistic exercise where a young woman trapped herself in her own bad memories and publicly labeled herself as a victim, which will now be her identity forever. This isn't feminism - which should empower women, not cripple them” (Daley). This response is replete with sexism and ableism, not only in her problematic use of “cripple,” but also in her invisibilization and delegitimation of mental disabilities (which she dismissively refers to as “bad memories”). This line of thinking about mental disabilities is longstanding - people often assume that “mentally ill persons are merely malingering, dwelling unnecessarily with emotional pain, and in need of toughening up”
(Simpkins and Orem 144). Paglia is also making this move by associating vocal victims of assault with negative qualities, such as lying or exaggerating and using fabricated stories for personal advancement (which recalls the narrative of special treatment, detailed above). Paglia also goes on to incriminate Sulkowicz’s performance as indicative of self-pathologization, which has gone unnoticed in the current academic climate (Daley). It is interesting that Paglia is complaining about no one noticing the pathology playing out in Sulkowicz’s performance, 53 because by doing so, she is actively participating in the pathologization of survivors. And although she misplaces the blame on who is doing the pathologizing, she is right that no one is noticing the pathologization of survivors by dominant rape discourses. With known cultural critics, such as Paglia, contributing to the sexist-ableist pathologization of college-aged survivors, it is no wonder that so few come forward publicly.31
Sulkowicz’s Mattress Performance challenges the sexist-ableist narrative of pathology by deploying counter-hegemonic frames of healing and the purpose of art. The dialogue induced by her performance, as well as the performance itself, make this de-pathologizing move by centering survivors and their narratives in the public sphere and emphasizing the importance of a communal response to the process of healing. Her performance thus disrupts the dominant notion that there is something wrong with survivors, which then rationalizes their removal from campus or the cloistering of trauma in the private sphere. We first see this in the repeated connection that Sulkowicz and writers covering her work make between Carry That Weight and the history of feminist performance art that engages in institutional critique. This intentional rhetorical move situates Sulkowicz’s work in a long line of artists (including Yoko Ono, Ana
Mendieta, Suzanne Lacy, and Leslie Leibowitz), which lends her performance legitimacy. It also pushes back on the idea that her experience with sexual violence is a rare occurrence that should be handled individually and privately. Instead, these feminist artists have placed sexual violence in the public discourse (where it must reside in order to effect change). For example,
Stassa Edwards writes in an article for The Hairpin, that “Carry That Weight implies that within the discourse surrounding rape, the separation of these categories are meaningless. The public
31 It is also useful to note here that Camille Paglia has a long history of making such violent statements, which has led many feminist activists and scholars to repudiate her work. 54 and private cannot be separated. The discourse of rape inhabits the public, private, personal, and political simultaneously.” As Edwards notes, Sulkowicz’s performance, through her use of a mattress, challenges the public/private divide. Such a challenge is possible because the mattress in the performance is both familiar and out of place: familiar as a commonplace household item, but out of place as it is being carried through the public spaces on Columbia’s campus.
Furthermore, the mattress’s form is typically imbued with feelings of safety, intimacy, privacy, and domesticity; however, these associations are subverted as Sulkowicz is using them to illuminate an experience of violence and place it directly in the public eye. So, at the same time that Sulkowicz’s Mattress Performance draws viewers in and creates a sense of familiarity, it also disturbs or unsettles them through the very points that were initially recognizable. The other feminist artists who are connected to Sulkowicz’s performance also attempted to disrupt rape myths by destroying the notion of a public/private divide.
Sulkowicz also challenges the narrative of pathology by structuring her performance as one that almost requires the participation of community members. I write “almost” here, because, as she revealed in her first interview for Carry That Weight, “A mattress is the perfect size for me to just be able to carry it enough that I can continue with my day, but also heavy enough that I have to continually struggle with it” (Frost et al.). She does not need other people to help her carry it, but community aid makes the undertaking much more feasible and reduces both the physical and emotional/symbolic burden (see figure 2 for an image of this community aid). In fact, one writer noted how “a new student group Carry The Weight Together has been formed by another visual arts major, Allie Rickard, specifically” to aid Sulkowicz (Davis). Thus,
Mattress Performance upholds the practice of collective public healing, which flies in the face of the narrative of pathology and any attempts to remove or sequester vocal survivors. 55
As long as colleges and universities rely on the rhetoric of compulsory able- bodied/mindedness to keep certain people out and uphold their campuses as bastions of neoliberalism, it will be difficult for survivors to come forward or publicly claim their trauma; in this environment, their claims to space will be seen as illegitimate and their physical presences as contaminating the intellectually rigorous campus climate. Therefore, the work of artivist projects like the Breaking Out Campaign, the Clothesline Project, and the Mattress Performance plays a critical role in challenging both notions of who belongs in public academic spaces and the tendency to discipline those who blur such distinctions through pathologization and removal.
Another such evasive discursive trend that is often deployed by college administrators and officials is the claim of willful ignorance: ignorance of the frequency with which sexual violence is happening, ignorance of the inadequacy of Title IX policies, and ignorance of the impacts of sexual violence on student survivors. I turn now to this sexist-ableist rhetorical practice and the artivist critique of its discourses.
“Rape Doesn’t Happen Here”32 : Critiquing the Narrative of Willful Ignorance
The final rhetorical theme that I identified in my research is that of willful ignorance, or the excuse that universities do not need to address these problems or take them seriously because they simply do not occur on their campuses, there is no way to know if it is happening, or they are already doing as much as can be expected. This line of thinking is partially based in the idea that rape survivors who go public or seek legal recompense are likely to lie. For example, the
“Hale Warning” - named for “The seventeenth century judge Sir Matthew Hale [who] asserted that rape is ‘an accusation easily to be made, hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the
32 From Bidwell’s “Campus Sexual Assault.” 56 party accused, tho’ never so innocent’” - was part of courtroom practices into the 1980s
(Edwards et al. 768). Compounding the prevalent myth that victims lie, is the fact that “rape myths are higher on campuses than in the general population,” partially because of the social power of fraternities and athletics teams, but also because many of the men who are being accused of sexual violence in these settings carry a lot of institutional privilege (Oliver 6; 12-13).
When the perpetrator is a white, visibly able-bodied/minded, upper middle-class college student, it becomes harder for the campus community and general public to believe accusations of sexual assault and to support actions that might jeopardize their future (Oliver 7-8). College students are supposed to be the next generation of world leaders, after all. The problem with this understanding is that it privileges the goals and lives of one group of students (white, wealthy, able-bodied/minded, and male) over the lives and goals of all others. Furthermore, the suspicion of vocal or “out” survivors is part of a long history in the U.S. of cultural and political skepticism being aimed at people with disabilities. As previously mentioned, this includes the idea that people with mental disabilities are being dramatic, but it also extends to the disability con: “a profound anxiety regarding disability imposture… which emerged powerfully in late nineteenth- century American culture and again in the late twentieth century through the present, in response to new extensions of social benefits to disabled people” (Samuels 18-19). Survivors of sexual violence, who are making their trauma visible, thus sit at the intersection of both sexist and ableist histories of disciplining skepticism.
The circulation and enforcement of 2011’s “Dear Colleague” letter challenged this rhetoric of willful ignorance: where initially schools could easily claim low Clery numbers and complete ignorance, the Department of Education’s letter certainly shattered the myth that any
57 college could be rape-free.33 This letter underscored a newer, stricter guideline for applying Title
IX to protect college students from sexual assault and harassment.34 The goal of this set of guidelines was to create an equitable and accountable college environment, meaning that sexual assault policies needed to endorse the “equal treatment of both accuser and accused” (Anderson
1973). Included in these new federal expectations was the need for a Title IX statement and coordinator, the implementation of specific procedures and timelines protecting the rights of both the complainant and defendant, and the use of a new standard of evidence (a preponderance of evidence) (1973-4).35 Thus, schools could not claim ignorance as a legitimate rationale for not addressing sexual violence - it was now their job to know and respond effectively.
However, the establishment of new guidelines still allowed universities to settle once reaching a bare minimum.36 In this way, colleges and universities can continue to turn away from survivors’ complaints if they are meeting federal minimum standards, so the narrative of willful ignorance of the existence of survivors becomes a narrative of willful ignorance of the
33 The Clery Act requires that federally funded colleges and universities report rates of sexual violence as part of their overall level of crime (Becker). 34 This new application of Title IX stemmed from feminist advocacy, which mirrored earlier advocacy to reform how the criminal justice system treated sexual assault and harassment (Anderson 1943). 35 The 2014 “Questions and Answers” document published by the OCR further clarified the 2011 guidelines. 36 Finding Title IX loopholes or minimum requirements also mirrors the response to disability specific legislation, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). For example, the ADA defines disability impairments in relation to the general population, but handily does not explain which population should be considered “general.” This unclear language has led to serious problems in ensuring that people with disabilities receive accommodations. Legal scholar Ruth Colker points out that this lack of specificity has already led to a trend that threatens the Section 504 protections in the workforce (328). Although such obviously detrimental impacts have not yet been seen in education protections, Colker suspects it will be impacted similarly (330). For instance, the vague language in the act over how to determine if someone is disabled or substantially impaired allows colleges and universities to “become more aggressive in questioning their responsibility to learning disabled students” (333). So, students with disabilities in graduate school could be refused accommodations, because they are higher-achieving than certain portions of the public (depending on if they are compared to fellow graduate students, future coworkers, college graduates more generally, or everyone in their age group). This line of thinking also reproduces practices of biocertification. 58 lack of helpful responses or policies.37 Furthermore, the new Secretary of Education under
Trump has rescinded the standard of evidence from the 2011 letter, as well as the requirement that investigations be completed in 60 days (“Q&A on Campus Sexual Misconduct”). This reaction follows a trend of pushback to the Obama administration guidelines and the initial application of Title IX to sexual violence.38 Legal scholar Michelle Anderson eloquently outlines how this resistance stems from sexist and hypocritical understandings of the legal system and misunderstandings of the federal guidelines in the recent OCR statements. For example, the complaints about the OCR guidelines violating the due process of accused students
“suggests a stronger interest in protecting those accused of sexual assault than those accused of other campus misconduct who face the same limited process rights and potential consequences of campus adjudication gone wrong” (Anderson 1986). Furthermore, the desire to elevate the standard of evidence to be greater than the advised preponderance of evidence standard fails to consider that this is the standard of evidence used in many student misconduct procedures; so the same conclusion could be made that there is something about sexual violence drawing the ire of those in opposition (1986). This recurring cultural and juridical inability to believe women’s
37 Even more troubling, though, is the fact that despite the conversations on sexual assault happening in the media and politics, campus presidents often still refuse to acknowledge or participate in them. Jill Filipovic writes that in 2015 “More than 100 institutions of higher learning are currently under federal investigation for potentially sexual assault complaints, but nearly 80 percent of college and university presidents say sexual assault isn’t prevalent on their campuses… only 8 percent strongly agreed with the statement, ‘sexual assault is prevalent at U.S. colleges and universities.” In addition to this, in 2016, “over 40 percent of colleges and universities [reported] no sexual assaults” (Oliver 161). 38 Some legal scholars and conservative politicians have voiced concerns over the newer application of Title IX for a variety of reasons, citing anxieties about the treatment of accused students and the capacity of academic institutions to respond to such accusations. Many media figures have also stated that feminist demands for schools to handle the sexual violence occurring on their campuses actually create environments in which rape is more likely to occur or where women are more likely to think they have been assaulted. These outcries intensified after the Obama administration’s circulation of the 2011 ‘Dear Colleague’ Letter and 2014 Questions & Answers document and the creation of the 2014 White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault. 59 stories of bodily violation is parallel to society’s inability to trust people with disabilities and can be tied to ideas of rhetorical fitness (see discussion on this topic in earlier sections).
The adherence to willful ignorance on college campuses is illustrated by the history of the
Clothesline Project at the University of Chicago. This artivist campaign was denied funding in its second year by the Annual Allocations committee, at least partially on the basis that the “all- male committee” did not think there would be enough new stories of assault every year to keep the project running (Cueto). The complete lack of comprehension around the epidemic scale of sexual violence at universities is indicative of the ignorance that many policy makers and media sources have, and it also reveals the very real consequences of such ignorance: “The result is often a lack of resources allocated to solving the situation and the women trying to fight for their cause left looking and feeling irrational and angry,” not to mention the thousands of traumatized students being overlooked by the institutions they are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend (Cueto). This ignorance is even more surprising considering the statistics, which point out that approximately one out of every five women in college is likely to be assaulted (“Statistics about Sexual Violence”). Furthermore, this exchange between founder Patty Fernandez and the all-male funding committee took place in the midst of a national conversation on sexual violence in colleges and universities (the “Dear Colleague” letter was released just two years earlier).
Such a refusal to acknowledge the gravity of sexual violence in college communities exhibits a dogged willful ignorance, almost to the point of negligence. The lack of information, discussion, or desire to be educated surrounding the presence of sexual violence in academic spaces, despite the availability of information, only serves to reinforce the idea that these experiences are not worth listening to or did not really happen, which can be retraumatizing and frames survivors as liars, attention seekers, or “crazy” women. 60
Eventually Fernandez got funding, but only after she went public about the unfair treatment and created a petition. The school’s reaction to the petition’s threat to their image stands in sharp contrast with the ambivalence they initially displayed over supporting a student group concerned with helping survivors and addressing sexual violence. It is no surprise, then, that Fernandez saw the eventual inclusion as bittersweet, because the funding committee was
“really angry that we went public... They were concerned with not appearing like they don't support survivors" (Cueto). Their support was thus more in an effort to save face and promote the school’s brand than to support the fledgling student activist group.
This exchange between campus authority figures who set the budget and make policy decisions and student activists was echoed again and again by Clothesline Project organizers and participants. For example, Olivia Ortiz (whose encounter with biocertification and pathologization I detail above) points out that “The burden is kind of placed upon the people who have to bring it up… You don't really see colleges being proactive” (Dries). Ortiz is speaking not just from a position of survivor, here, but also from her activist involvement in the Phoenix
Survivors Alliance and the Clothesline Project. The 2014 director, Veronica Portillo-Heap, also noticed the lack of concern or responsiveness: "The university wants to get across the message that it doesn't happen here… Universities care about their brands. It's not in their best interest for alumni to know" (Levitt).39 The problem with this tension is that it places an undue burden on student activists to continuously challenge the institutional behemoth that is their college or
39 Legal scholar Nancy Cantalupo corroborates this analysis by pointing out that “The schools that ignore the problem have fewer reports and look more safe, whereas the schools that encourage victim reporting have more reports and look less safe” (219). This means that artivist campaigns, which take up both digital and physical space and are platforms for amplifying stories of assault on college campuses, can be seen as bringing negative media attention and jeopardizing collegiate brands. This would explain in part the combative relationships between college administrations and artivists. 61 university. By not being proactive about updating old or harmful policies, students (often those who have been traumatized already by a toxic environment or violent actions) must endlessly pressure the administration to make necessary changes. This activism is made still harder considering that “the onus for change rests on a constantly shifting student body which typically attends the college for a far shorter time than the administrators they’ll interact with” (Dries).
So, not only is the continual process of protesting and negotiating emotionally and physically exhausting (and on top of the usual student workload and collegiate expectations), but it is also difficult to enact lasting change.40
Of course, since the initial roadblock to funding, the Clothesline Project has flourished.
As Fernandez suspected, there is unfortunately never a shortage of new stories of sexual violence on college campuses. Thus, the very existence of the Clothesline Project and the continued student involvement and support challenges the sexist-ableist narrative of willful ignorance. It is harder for the administration to claim ignorance when this project continues to exist and receive funding and student submissions. If, as Fernandez notes, “each shirt represented one body that had been affected by sexual assault,” then each year artivists construct a stark reminder of the presence of trauma within the student body (Cueto).
This challenge to the narrative of willful ignorance is further bolstered by the creation of counter-hegemonic alliances across and within universities, which contest the ability of administrations to claim ignorance. For example, at the University of Chicago, Olivia Ortiz founded the Phoenix Survivors Alliance. It was born from students who met while participating in the Clothesline Project (Levitt). The creation of the Phoenix Survivors Alliance points out
40 This is partially why the creation of counter-hegemonic alliances across and within universities becomes crucial to maintaining pressure on administrations to change bad policies, while avoiding activist burnout. 62 how artivism can inspire new groups to form and how they can work in tandem to push for policy change. Furthermore, the Clothesline Project itself was formed out of inspiration from other art campaigns and anti-rape protests, namely the national Clothesline Project (created in
1990) and Angie Epifano’s exposé on Amherst College’s failing Title IX policies. This latter text was circulated in October 2012 and led students at the University of Chicago to begin asking questions about their own school’s Title IX policies. Such curiosity ended in the discovery of mistreatments such as Ortiz’s and the filing of an OCR complaint (Levitt). The Clothesline
Project is therefore situated amidst a national campus movement to hold institutions accountable.
Unsurprisingly, then, another tactic deployed by the Clothesline Project to challenge the narrative of willful ignorance is explicitly holding their academic institution accountable. This goal is reflected in the t-shirts on display every year, remarks from campaign organizers, and articles written about the project. I identified at least four shirts displayed in 2014 on institutional failure, ranging from “I do not believe that at the U of C in 2011, only 6 offenses occured. Drown the injurious silence” (see figure 5) to “I was silenced, shut down… told there wasn’t enough evidence” (UChicago Clothesline Project). Another shirt from 2015 simply states: “fuck you Dean Art”41 (UChicago Clothesline Project). These bold and incriminating statements are not subjected to censorship from the Clothesline Project organizers, which indicates that the project is invested in creating a space for participants to engage in institutional critique through sharing stories of survivorship. This role is not lost on the project organizers, as indicated by Sydelle Keisler’s statement that “The visibility of this project is also a way of showing the University that we exist and reminding them that we are human, we are struggling,
41 Dean Art was the Dean of Students and the Sexual Assault Dean on Call for a while at the University of Chicago. 63 and we need more institutional support” (Huang). In this way, the Clothesline Project seems to position itself as a liaison between survivors and campus policy makers; they listen and collect narratives, house them in a relatively uncontested and legitimated space, and then relay the messages to other campus activists or translate the experiences into policy change suggestions themselves. Such work by the Clothesline Project and other artivists brings to light what many survivors and activists already know: that “the most common reason college rape victims didn't report was ‘institutional barriers,’ including discouraging administrators and unclear procedures”
(Levitt).
The Breaking Out Campaign also seeks to counter the idea that rape “does not happen here” and that when it does it is taken care of effectively. For example, in 2016, Duke’s low safety rating was barely attributed to sexual violence (“only 9.6 percent of the blame”). These numbers need to be contrasted with nationwide statistics of underreporting42 and with the fact that during that academic year there were hundreds of reports made to both Duke’s Office of
Institutional Equity and the Women’s Center. Even more damning, only sixteen of these reported assaults were investigated for a hearing, and only one qualified for a “Duke Alert,” which conveniently fit rape stereotypes of a stranger attacking a student with a knife in the woods (Dryfoos). Underreporting, lack of investigation, and selective alerts to the student body combine to create an image of a largely rape-free campus, where only outlier situations that fulfill the collective imagination of what qualifies as rape are responded to quickly.
Breaking Out organizers are aware of this narrative of willful ignorance. For example,
2015-2016 organizer Dana Raphael pointed out to me that although Duke’s administration and
42 Only 20-30% of college-age survivors choose to report their assaults to the police (“The Criminal Justice System”), and in 2014, 91% of colleges reported that zero rapes had occurred on their campuses (Becker). 64 student body were supportive of their campaign from the beginning (unlike the more obvious initial tension between the Clothesline Project and the University of Chicago),
Part of that is probably because a lot of the survivors in the Duke campaigns covered
their faces, protecting their identity. And the other piece is that Breaking Out doesn't
reveal perpetrator identities… I think it's easier to react well to a campaign that doesn't
upset anyone's personal life. If we did reveal names, people would have a much harder
time reconciling the fact that they have been best friends with a rapist. People don't like
to accept that.
Here, Raphael connects the support for the campaign (especially from fellow students) to the fact that Breaking Out does not directly seek to incriminate individual students.43 I understand this unwillingness of the campaign to name perpetrators as ambivalent. On the one hand, it allows survivors to have a space to publicly claim the experience of being assaulted and tell their stories without needing to go through punitive processes, such as the criminal justice system or their school’s Title IX investigations (which are often burdensome to both parties). But, as Raphael notes, it also lets individual perpetrators off the hook. This exemplifies the process of negotiation that occurs even in the radical spaces of artivist campaigns: organizers of these campaigns choose to focus on institutional accountability rather than individual, and this decision is reflected in the structure of their projects.44
43 This requirement to not name perpetrators is also interesting to put in conversation with Sulkowicz’s performance, which in itself left the perpetrator’s name out; but due to the media coverage of her Title IX investigation, his identity was impossible to keep anonymous. Many negative responses to her piece centered on the idea that she was inappropriately slandering him, so these reactions might have been different if her abuser was never identified. Finally, the lack of personal identifying information of perpetrators in both the Breaking Out Campaign and Clothesline Project further underscores their focus on institutional critique, rather than individual accountability. 44 Guisela Latorre notes that public art, especially when it is tied to social justice issues, often requires a complex process of negotiation on behalf of the artists (140). 65
The tension between the Breaking Out Campaign and the campus community is also reflected in the digital public. When the campaign went viral in 2015, Raphael revealed that she and other organizers “[spent] hours each week banning people from the page and using comment filters to try to get rid of inappropriate, creepy, and victim-blaming comments on the pictures - including people justifying the rapes that had occurred.” So, even in cases where artivist campaigns have the public support of the administration, it does not mean that everyone in the campus community is open-minded, nor that the administration is actually doing the work needed to help survivors (which makes their support of the campaigns a bit hypocritical).
Despite this attempt at covering up the reality of sexual violence at Duke, survivors and activists know the truth. This awareness is reflected in the counter-hegemonic discourse that the
Breaking Out Campaign deploys to hold Duke as an institution accountable. First, the campaign was created to protest a reduced statute of limitations for the school’s misconduct policy
(Sunhay). Second, even after Duke changed this component of its Title IX policy in 2013, participants continued to use Breaking Out as a platform for institutional critique. For example, one 2016 participant writes in their accompanying caption: “I’m participating in Breaking Out to make people aware that Duke allows almost all rapists found guilty to return to campus. How can I feel safe knowing that not only my perpetrator but so many other perpetrators attend this school after being found guilty?” (Breaking Out). Another participant from 2014 echoes this frustration on their poster, which reads: “He gave me a concussion. Conduct gave him a clean slate” (Breaking Out). Altogether, out of the five campaigns to which I had access, there were five participants who used their platform to draw attention to their university’s failure to address sexual assault. So, although the purpose of the Breaking Out Campaign after its first iteration in
2012 was not specifically to hold Duke accountable for improving its Title IX policy, it is clear 66 that participants were still unhappy with Duke’s system of responding to survivors. This dissatisfaction is further corroborated by the fact that between 2013 and 2016, there were four
OCR complaints filed against Duke for Title IX violations (one of which is still unresolved as of this writing) (“Campus Sexual Assault Under Investigation at Duke University”).
The Breaking Out Campaign’s refusal to accept that sexual violence does not happen at
Duke or that administrators are already taking care of it is also apparent in the campaign’s establishment of counter-hegemonic alliances within Duke and across other universities. These alliances can be seen first in Breaking Out’s positioning as an “homage” to another anti-rape artivist project, namely Grace Brown’s Project Unbreakable (Sharma). Not only does this positioning credit Brown’s work, but it also situates Duke’s campaign in a genealogy of similar projects, which makes it harder for institutions to say that these are isolated incidents or new problems. Second, the Breaking Out Campaign has inspired the creation of similar projects at different universities. I found five articles mentioning these counter-hegemonic alliances forming at institutions like Rhodes College, the University of Pittsburgh, and James Madison
University (Jones; Silber; Long; Hedgecock). These connections were largely enabled by the campaign’s digital presence, which resulted in the 2015 images going viral and in the modification of the group’s Facebook page to include digital submissions from across the nation and the world. This spike in interest also led Breaking Out organizers to create “a guidebook prepared to help students launch effective campaigns for campuses around the country”
(Hedgecock).45 Third, and similar to the Clothesline Project, Duke’s Breaking Out Campaign
45 Dana Raphael also pointed out to me that this digital branch of Duke’s campaign was critical for expanding the conversation to include the prevalence of sexual violence off-campus. The Clothesline Project does not have this large of a digital presence, but Sulkowicz’s campaign clearly did. So, although these projects focus on assaults 67 also encouraged new student activist groups to form on their own campus. For instance, Raphael pointed out to me that after participating in Breaking Out, she “got together with two other survivors from Duke and we started Duke Support, a support group/resource group for survivors of sexual assault.” This engagement also led to her participating in Duke's task force on sexual assault prevention. Thus, participation in artivist campaigns can lead to further activist involvement in other student groups, often in the form of new organizations that fill gaps that artivist-survivors are uniquely able to see.
Finally, with Mattress Performance, Sulkowicz disrupts the narrative of willful ignorance by positioning her work in an artivist genealogy, crafting counter-hegemonic alliances within and across college campuses, and seeking to hold the institution accountable for preventing and responding to sexual violence. First, as many commentators on Carry That Weight note, and as
Sulkowicz confirms herself, the performance is tied to a long lineage of anti-rape feminist art
(the creation and impact of this genealogy is explored more extensively above). In addition to disrupting narratives of pathology and special treatment, this genealogy of feminist performance art also challenges the notion that Sulkowicz’s experience is singular. Rather, the fact that these artivist protests have been around for a long time (at least since the 1960s) points out how
Sulkowicz’s experience is frighteningly closer to a norm than an anomaly. Furthermore, in an
MSNBC interview with Sulkowicz, another guest on the show, Salamishah Tillet (a professor and anti-rape activist herself), points out that Sulkowicz and others like her have long turned to art when all other systems have failed them. Tillet further explains that prior to the recent application of Title IX to sexual violence, women on college campuses had very little resources
occurring on campus, they can also clearly create room for conversations and experiences located outside of academia. 68 available to them to combat rape culture, which also legitimates Sulkowicz’s experience and performance (Harris-Perry).
Second, although the other two artivist campaigns I analyze also create counter- hegemonic alliances to disrupt the narrative of willful ignorance, Sulkowicz’s performance incorporates this tactic in a different way: in addition to stemming from previous anti-rape artivist performances and inspiring collective carries across the nation at different universities46,
Carry That Weight is also somewhat dependent on collective participation for its day-to-day enactment (see figure 2). For example, Sulkowicz explained to one writer that carrying the mattress every day is “a lot of physical pain… By day three, I couldn't get out of bed” (Duan).
However, this performance becomes less physically strenuous with community members joining
Sulkowicz. Not only does community help make the load lighter, it also shifts the meaning of her performance. Elle writer Noel Duan points out that “These acquaintances aren't only helping her get from point A to point B but also sharing in her everyday burden: carrying the weight of her past—and present—upon her shoulders.” Those who choose to help Sulkowicz carry the mattress are thus embodying a supportive response to her narrative, acting as a visual representation of survivor legitimation. In this way, the creation of counter-hegemonic alliances is integral to the theory and planning behind Sulkowicz’s performance, as well as its changing daily rhetorical impact.
Third, Sulkowicz explains that the purpose of her performance is not to change the outcome of her Title IX trial and investigation, but instead to explore her experiences with
46 On October 29, 2014, there was a National Day of Action on colleges and universities across the U.S., meant to both show solidarity with Sulkowicz and hold every academic institution accountable for addressing sexual violence. Thousands of students participated by carrying mattresses and protesting ineffective policies (Svokos). 69 trauma. Yet, the fact that so many observers and writers continued to assume that the purpose of her performance was the former, makes an exploration of institutional accountability worth undertaking.47 Moreover, there is a difference between trying to protest a decision in order to change its outcome and what Sulkowicz did, which is still a form of institutional critique.
Instead of going after her perpetrator in another arena (such as through a criminal charge or civic suit), Sulkowicz dropped any possible charges to creatively explore her experiences on
Columbia’s campus, keeping the focus on the school that let her down rather than shifting her complaint to another institution. At least four of the articles about Carry That Weight note the trend of college anti-rape activists highlighting institutional responsibility rather than solely individual accountability.48 For example, one writer points out how the specific location of the university informs the strategy of institutional accountability: “shattering silence, in 2014, means not just coming out with an atrocity tale about your assault but offering what Danielle Dirks, a sociologist at Occidental, calls ‘an atrocity tale about how poorly you were treated by the people you pay $62,500 a year to protect you’” (Grigoriadis). Another article frames this trend as survivors and activists responding to “institutional betrayal” at the hands of their universities
(Kingkade). Similar to the Clothesline Project and the Breaking Out Campaign, then, Mattress
Performance does not let the institution off the hook or buy into claims of obliviousness, which disrupts the narrative of willful ignorance at Columbia and elsewhere.
47 It’s also important to note that the administrators and faculty members who adjudicated Sulkowicz’s trial and investigation were clearly not trained properly and made very inappropriate comments throughout the process (Harris-Perry). 48 In total, there were twelve texts across all three datasets that uplifted institutional accountability. 70
Conclusion
In light of these artivist campaigns producing such complexities in survivorship narratives, we might ask ourselves: is anything changing? The recent explosion of #MeToo (and related projects like Time’s Up and 5050by2020) can be read in conversation with work done by these campus artivists. Although, #MeToo was created in 2006 by civil rights activist Tarana
Burke (and thus precedes each of the artivist campaigns I consider in this paper), its cultural currency increased exponentially in 2017 with celebrities taking up the hashtag to call out industry abusers. Like the college artivists detailed above, #MeToo seeks to create change at an institutional and cultural level, rather than just at an individual one. To dismantle rape culture we cannot focus solely on holding individuals accountable; rather, we must address the institutions that are supporting abusers and have been for years. So, yes, this widespread shift in focus marks an important change in the way we have talked about sexual violence in the last ten years; however, it does not mark a completed journey or a flawless activist strategy. Rather, we see social change from the anti-rape movement’s activist strategies accelerate at times (like from
2011-2014 when Title IX was reinterpreted to hold universities accountable for sexual violence and from 2017 to the present with #MeToo), but this progress also sometimes flounders or backtracks (like with Trump’s rolling back of the 2011 Title IX interpretations and the continued public support of various predators in the entertainment industry). Thus, we can see the anti-rape movement’s progress running parallel to a survivor’s experience with trauma: often circuitous, uneven, nonlinear, or messy, but never meaningless or worth disregarding.
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The Clothesline Project, the Breaking Out Campaign, and Carry That Weight are just three of many artivist campaigns on campuses across the United States. At the heart of these campaigns is a desire to eradicate rape culture by centering survivors’ stories in public art and rewriting dominant narratives of survivorship and assault. Furthermore, through community involvement, networks of anti-rape activists are formed within and across universities. These networks are crucial for maintaining pressure on college administrators to address sexual violence, instead of shifting responsibility to other institutions or onto survivors themselves. In creating counter-hegemonic spaces and narratives, artivist projects also expose the sexist-ableist rhetoric that campus administrators and other community members deploy, such as emphasizing survivors’ pathologization and desire for special treatment or positioning them as anomalies on an otherwise safe campus. All three of these rhetorical maneuvers shift accountability and allow administrators to look the other way when survivors make complaints about their treatment.
These artivist projects remain critical for challenging sexist-ableist responses to college survivors, especially as recent political shifts at the national level seek to reframe the advances made by the Obama administration as “unfair” to the alleged perpetrators and to loosen the recently tightened Title IX guidelines. As Emma Sulkowicz’s thesis advisor, Jon Kessler, points out in an op-ed: “In the era of Trump, with its emboldened and empowered misogynists, white supremacists, fascists, racists, and climate deniers, protest art is more crucial than ever. Artists must not cower from expressing their views, and institutions must continue to support challenging works so that those messages continue to be heard.” He is right that artists must continue to create new work challenging violent norms; but we must also remember to pause and look back and around us, to learn from past and present artivist projects, for they are imbued with valuable insight on imagining alternative forms of communication and community. 72
Studying and acknowledging the work of anti-rape student artivists thus allows us to continue to add to their counter-hegemonic legacies and create more lasting change.
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Appendix: Photographs from Anti-Rape Artivist Campaigns
Figure 1: 2014 Breaking Out Campaign Participant
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Figure 2: Mattress Performance Collective Carry
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Figure 3: 2017 Clothesline Project Shirt
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Figure 4: Another Participant from the 2014 Breaking Out Campaign
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Figure 5: 2014 Clothesline Project Shirt
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