ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on aesthetic modes of feminist resistance to gendered violence. It reviews how the creative work of feminist authors and artists since 1968 has confronted its recipients with gender-based violence underpinning societal structures. By putting on display the violent objectification of women in the cinema and in the street, and by offering passers-by the opportunity to take up the position of sexual assaulter within the allowable space of the performance, the performance incites further violence. The chapter explores how affect emerges out of the feminist creative aesthetics that are forged from gender-based or sexual violence. It discusses provocation, refusal, and retreat as examples of aesthetic motions, and explores how these motions produce emotions that build affective landscapes. Contemporary feminist activism has gained popular visibility particularly since 2013, and has rapidly increased in speed, transmission, and urgency since the US elections in November 2016.
