Lynn Hershman Leeson

The Un-Heroic Act: Representations of Rape in Contemporary Women’s Art in the U.S.
Category
Article
Date
Oct 3, 2018
Source
The Brooklyn Rail
Author
Jessica Holmes
Excerpt

Ramos-Chapman has said in interviews that the piece is a response to her own rape, and in this sense, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s video Electronic Diary Part III: First Person Plural (1988) might be called its spiritual companion. Leeson also speaks directly to the camera and in brief, lacerating scenes, recounts the hells and memories she was forbidden to talk about as a child, including both her personal experience of assault and rape as a child, and her extended family’s suffering during the Holocaust. The scenes are periodically overlaid with World War II footage, with which Leeson underscores the trauma of rape as another sort of holocaust—one perpetrated upon women. Their bodies damaged, their souls annihilated; it’s horror that seeps through generations…

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