The Global Clothesline Project
(GCP): Bearing Witness to Violence Against Women
The Global Clothesline Project (GCP): Bearing Witness to Violence Against Women is part of the international movement against violence directed at women. The GCP invites women to create T-shirts that express the violence they suffered and the healing they have experienced.
The
effectiveness of the project lies in the work that can be done at an individual
or small group therapeutic level (anonymously or confidentially as women may
individually or collectively create T-Shirts), and at the social movement level
with the public display of shirts that expose the violence and healing that has
taken place within a particular community – be it a university campus, NGO, or
local community. The exhibit has the potential to open up a dialogue about
violence and to engage victim-survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators to “see”
what impact violence has and work towards ending it.
A powerful tool to educate
the community about the impact of gender violence, it provides both agency and
safety to vulnerable victims. It empowers survivors and allies to come together
to not only express individual stories but also to collectively challenge human
rights violations that are often constructed and dismissed as traditional cultural
practices. This presentation will offer a qualitative and comparative analysis
of women’s experiences of violence, healing, and action across cultures. It
examines the relationship between gender inequality and gender violence, and
the health impacts of gender violence as the most pervasive human rights
violation that affects women and children today across both the developed and
developing world.
In the process of breaking silence through images and words, survivors are not only finding their own voices, they are also collectively creating new narratives that challenge the individual and collective denial of abuse and the reproduction of violence. As contributors are constructing oppositional narratives that challenge traditional narrative, they often encounter skepticism and resistance to the telling of their stories for speaking out is a political as well as a therapeutic act, and as such, is a claim to power. As Milan Kundera writes in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 'Man's struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’
In the process of breaking silence through images and words, survivors are not only finding their own voices, they are also collectively creating new narratives that challenge the individual and collective denial of abuse and the reproduction of violence. As contributors are constructing oppositional narratives that challenge traditional narrative, they often encounter skepticism and resistance to the telling of their stories for speaking out is a political as well as a therapeutic act, and as such, is a claim to power. As Milan Kundera writes in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 'Man's struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’
Susan D. Rose is a Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology and Director of the Community Studies Center at Dickinson college (USA). Professor Rose specializes in the sociology of religion, family, and education; violence; indigenous studies; and inequality, race, class, and gender studies. She uses a comparative (cross-cultural and historical) approach to the study of family, sexuality, religion, education, migration, and violence.
She has conducted fieldwork in the United States, Guatemala, the Philippines, and South Korea on evangelical movements, education, and gender that has resulted in a number of articles and books. These include: Challenging Global Gender Violence: The Global Clothesline Project (Palgrave, 2013); Exporting the American Gospel: Global Christian Fundamentalism (Routledge, 1998) and Keeping Them Out of the Hands of Satan: Christian Schooling in America (Routledge, 1986; 2017).
Her recent work explores sexuality education and gender-based violence in Cameroon, Cuba, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Venezuela, and the United States; the impact of the Religious Right on social policy in the United States, and Indigenous Studies: The Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations (University of Nebraska Press, 2016).
Practical information
Time: 15.30-17.00
Location: Drift 25, room 0.02
Chair: Prof. Rosemarie Buikema
If you want to attend, please register via nog@uu.nl.