Abstract: Ana Mendieta's Rape Scene (1973), a live, realistic staging of the artist herself as a brutalized rape victim documented in chilling photographs, is often referenced but uninterrogated in scholarship of the self-identified "Third World Feminist" artist. Staging herself as a believable victim of rape for unsuspecting viewers, Mendieta viscerally demonstrated the affective trauma of feeling like the "next" victim of sexualized violence and underscored the flaws of the systems of redress—legal, artistic, journalistic—that excluded women of color. Through close visual and contextual analysis, this essay traces Mendieta's deft navigation of the historical factors that brought the artwork into being, the relevance of her Cuban-American identity, and how rape was legally and socially understood in the mid-1970s—the very years in which the concepts of sexualized violence and women's bodily autonomy were undergoing unprecedented changes. Rape Scene is key to understanding the roots of #MeToo-era activism and simultaneous dismantling of Constitutional protections of reproductive rights (previously upheld as recourse for sexualized violence). Rape Scene activated concerns of women's autonomy and disparities in safety across demographic identities—discourses of the day that linger now.
Nicole Scalissi (Thu,) studied this question.