The Female Body and Violence placed a new book on sexual violence entitled The Courage to Heal (LA and VŠŠD, 1998) into the context of a wider understanding of violence, the control of the body and relations between the genders, to examine sexual violence, the forms of control of women’s bodies through history, and how they are manifested in art, the media and everyday life.
The topic was presented by four authors who write about this issue: a Hungarian artist and theoritician who lives and works in New York, Orshi Drozdik; researcher and editor, Darja Zaviršek; activist and co-ordinator of Greenwich Women’s Aid, Margaret Eggers; and an activist and co-ordinator of special programmes at East Thames Housing, Kerry Grant. The lecture by Orshi Drozdik, Medical Erotic; the violated female body was based on one of her most successful installations, which deals with the problem of the female body and its subjection to medical examination. Darja Zaviršek’s lecture, Between Cultural Anaesthesia and Physical Memories covered the problems of self-evident violence against women in contemporary society, its causes and consequences. Kerry Grant and Margaret Eggers discussed practical experiences in their work with women and children who have been victims of violence.
