Agency Visualization: Empowering Sexual Violence Survivors (A Feminist Study of Visual Rhetoric)
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Abstract
News coverage of sexual violence on mainstream media portals often objectifies women as victims, both in the narrative and the visualization presented through supporting illustrations. Media that continuously objectify women will reinforce public perception in understanding the issue of sexual violence as detrimental to women as the majority of victims. To address this, Remotivi organized an illustration competition to challenge all creators taking their side with victims and survivors of sexual violence. This study aims to explore how illustrations can become a counter-narrative to those objectifying and visualizing women as the suffering ones. This study uses a descriptive qualitative method with feminist visual rhetoric analysis. The authors found that illustrations depicting their creators’ side with survivors of sexual violence display various elements we barely find on mainstream media: representation of empowered women as subjects, active gestures resisting perpetrators, a view point that comes from women as subjects, and things that cultivate a new perspective. It is expected that the new coming of illustrations using feminist perspective will change the public in understanding the issue of sexual violence in a deep and empathic way, no longer merely viewing victims as objects of news coverage.
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