About this event
LearningThis presentation focuses on the work of artist Ana Mendieta and how it teaches us to re-read scenes of gendered and sexual violence. Accounts of sexual violence, whether in fiction or reality, typically grapple with the demand to rationalize and make sense of embodied behaviours, even as these behaviours tend not to be easily narratable or sensible; sexual violence therefore becomes a site of contested meaning-making, especially in ways inflected by gender, race, class, and sexuality. I argue that rather than attempting to smooth out or disavow confusion and ambiguity, Mendieta’s art foregrounds its inevitability as a part of live, embodied encounters, and that she invites viewers to contend with what it means to not know or understand the bodies with which they are confronted. This presentation asks: what ethical potential emerges when we re-attune ourselves from a position of certainty/mastery towards the fundamental opacities, idiosyncrasies, and strangeness of the body? How does the avowal of ambiguity change the way we understand, narrate, and redress intimate scenes of violence? And given the legacy of Mendieta and the circumstances of her unjust death in 1985, what solidarities emerge from her body of work, through which she evokes the interdependent politics of gender, race, empire, diaspora, and land? Victoria “Tia" Glista is a 5th year PhD candidate in English and Sexual Diversity Studies. Her SSHRC and OGS-funded dissertation Bodies That Move: Posing Feminist Alternatives, 1970-1990 investigates the gestures, postures, and poses deployed by American feminist writers and artists who reconfigured the terms by which the body is known and given value. Her scholarship has appeared in Camera Obscura and Contemporary Women’s Writing, and she writes criticism for public venues including The Guardian, Toronto Star, Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of the new literary magazine Toronto Review.