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Naming Sexual Violence: Epistemic Power, Narratives and Representations

“Uncovering the Shadows Beneath Creative Industries”: A Review of Marie Buscatto, Sari Karttunen and Mathilde Provansal (eds.), Gender-Based Violence in Arts and Culture: Perspectives on Education and Work, Cambridge, UK, Open Book Publishers, 2025

Dévoiler les zones d’ombre des industries créatives. Recension de l’ouvrage : Marie Buscatto, Sari Karttunen and Mathilde Provansal (eds.), Gender-Based Violence in Arts and Culture: Perspectives on Education and Work, Cambridge, UK, Open Book Publishers, 2025
Christina Misaki Nikitin

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1Gender-based violence is a global phenomenon, deeply embedded across all facets of public and private life, yet it remains largely understudied within artistic and cultural spheres. Gender-Based Violence in the Arts and Culture: Perspectives on Education and Work, edited by sociologists Marie Buscatto, Sari Karttunen and Mathilde Provansal, makes a timely and critical intervention into this gap. Emerging from research conducted in the wake of the 2017 #MeToo movement, the collection situates itself within the global reckoning with sexual violence that reshaped artistic, public and intellectual discourse. Ambitious and unapologetically feminist in design, Gender-Based Violence in the Arts and Culture exposes the systemic conditions that render artistic and cultural worlds particularly conducive to gender-based violence, where sexist and sexual acts of harm are ingrained in everyday, seemingly ordinary practices.

  • 1 Liz Kelly, “The Continuum of Sexual Violence,” in Jalna Hanmer and Mary Maynard (eds.), Women, Viol (...)

2The volume takes as its foundation feminist scholar Liz Kelly’s definition of sexual violence as a continuum – a formulation that rejects categorical distinctions and instead understands gender-based violence as a spectrum of sexist and sexual abuse, coercion and force shaped by lived experience.1 Applied across seven case studies spanning various artistic and regional contexts, this approach allows for a transnational comparison that underscores the collection’s central claim: gender-based violence in the arts is not a matter of isolated incidents nor individual misconduct, but a systemic outcome of global regimes of gender inequalities and gendered power relations. The contributors consist of scholars committed to feminist sociological research, who draw on extensive fieldwork within their respective artistic sectors, including French opera, Japanese popular music, French contemporary art education, Finnish photography, the UK screen industry, New York theatre and French electronic dance music. Drawing from survey data, interviews and ‘thick’ description, the contributors offer a nuanced account of how gender-based violence manifests in the arts – from everyday sexist remarks and persistent flirtation to overt harassment and assault – while also recognising the agency of those who navigate, negotiate and resist these pervasive structures of harm.

3The book is organised into three parts: Part I examines the systemic factors that perpetuate gender inequalities and institutionalised violence; Part II explores the intersections of artistic process, representation and lived experience; and Part III addresses collective strategies for confronting and challenging gender-based violence in artistic fields. Rather than reiterating this tripartite structure, this review highlights the volume’s most significant contributions in illuminating the distinctive forms and conditions through which gender-based violence manifests within artistic professions and industries.

When Art Justifies Violence

4One of the volume’s most compelling arguments is that artistic ideals can serve to legitimise gender-based violence within creative industries. The prevalence of hypersexualised themes, roles and aesthetics across artistic practices operates as a mechanism that naturalises abuses of power within heteronormative workplace hierarchies. In the case of French opera, Marie Buscatto, Soline Helbert and Ionela Roharik claim that the recurring trope of physical seduction by female characters spills beyond the stage, contributing to the hypersexualisation of women singers themselves. This environment enables men in positions of power to exploit the slippage between performance and professional conduct, turning artistic expression into a pretext for gender-based violence.

  • 2 Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 1989, Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press.

5A similar dynamic emerges in Leena-Maija Rossi and Sari Karttunen’s case study of the Helsinki School, a Finnish photography training and branding initiative which – despite its public image as female-led – was revealed to be dominated by male figures of authority, several of whom were later accused of sexual harassment. The chapter analyses photographs of women taken by both male teachers and female students, many of which can be reinterpreted as containing subtextual narratives of gender-based violence. Rossi and Karttunen argue that the visual economy of the art world, structured around the “male gaze,” commodifies the female body even in ostensibly self-representational works.2 Without a critical interrogation of this inherited aesthetic, women artists risk reproducing the heterosexist gaze of their male predecessors.

6Even when gender-based violence becomes the explicit subject of creative work, as in Anna Bull’s study of the UK screen industry, the boundary between representing and reproducing harm may be blurred. While the growing visibility of such themes has opened dialogue around sexual harassment and increased opportunities for women creators, Bull cautions that it has also introduced new risks: exploitative portrayals, unsafe work environments and the reiteration of violence through the mishandling of sensitive material. The collection thus raises a difficult question: does the aestheticisation of sexual themes in cultural production contribute to the persistence of gender-based violence within its institutions? Ultimately, these case studies expose the uneasy proximity between artistic expression and exploitation, revealing how entrenched gendered hierarchies of power within artistic sectors can distort creativity itself.

The Myth of The Male Genius

  • 3 Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran (...)

7A second recurring theme addresses the enduring myth of the male genius – a notion that has served to excuse sexual misconduct in the arts under the guise of exceptional talent. The celebration of genius and charismatic individuality within artistic industries, dominated by white, cisgender, heterosexual men of elite backgrounds, has fostered a culture of complicity in which abusive behaviours are rationalised as the collateral consequence of extraordinary brilliance. As feminist art historian Linda Nochlin famously argued, the scarcity of “great women artists” is not evidence of women’s lack of ability but of a history of structural exclusion and a canon that equates artistic authority with male subjectivity.3 Even when women do achieve recognition, their success is often credited to their association with male mentors, collaborators or partners.

8This ideology of male genius manifests most clearly in the pedagogical settings analysed by Mathilde Provansal, whose chapter examines gender-based violence in French art schools. Provansal finds that male professors abuse their positions of prestige and authority in environments where physical attractiveness and sexual desirability often affect the evaluation of female students. Hiring and selection processes routinely privilege “pretty girls” and “feminine” comportment, leading students to internalise doubts on whether they are valued for their abilities or their looks. Conditioned to view themselves as objects – muses, models or reflections of male creativity – women in the arts struggle to imagine themselves as artist-subjects with creative agency.

9Alice Laurent-Camena extends this critique to the French electronic music world, where, unlike the high proportion of female art school students in Provansal’s study, only around ten percent of electronic music performers in Parisian clubs are women. Her analysis of denunciations of gender-based violence traces a continuum from rumours and internal disclosures to public accusations, within which male intervention determines whether allegations are taken seriously. In this overwhelmingly male-dominated scene, claims against perpetrators acquire more legitimacy when corroborated by men, exposing the structural inequalities that render women’s voices insufficient on their own. The professional reputation of male artists, moreover, is intricately tied to that of their musical networks, prompting many within these circles to contain allegations internally to protect the scene’s public image. Together, these case studies suggest that dismantling gender-based violence in artistic worlds requires not only institutional reform, but a but a critical understanding of creativity itself as a gendered construct.

Gender, Labour and the Continuum of Exploitation

10A third key insight of the collection concerns the precarious labour conditions of artistic work and the ways in which the perceived exceptionalism of artists – as members outside conventional labour structures – enables the normalisation of gender-based violence. Across multiple chapters, the contributors show how the blurring of personal and professional boundaries within creative industries render sexual harassment an accepted feature of “industry culture.” In such environments, many come to view gender-based violence as an inevitable aspect of career advancement, a professional hazard to be managed rather than confronted.

  • 4 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Berkeley, CA, University of C (...)

11The dynamics of this normalisation are particularly evident in Chiharu Chujo’s study of the Japanese popular music industry. Invoking Max Weber’s notion of charismatic authority, Chujo points to how artists’ self-conception as members of a “charismatic community” distinguishes them from conventional workers entitled to rights and collective protections.4 Musicians’ reliance on personal networks and hierarchical mentorship structures fosters a culture in which professional advancement hinges upon maintaining personal relationships and performing charm, especially towards male superiors. Within this system, women artists often refrain from acknowledging experiences of sexual harassment, sustaining an environment where, as Chujo observes, “the concept of violence remains elusive” (p. 68). Addressing gender-based violence risks professional retaliation or the stigmatising label of “victim,” a status that can undermine their artistic legitimacy. Consequently, the everyday violence of sexual harassment is reframed as a normal, even necessary, condition of participation in the creative industry.

12The New York theatre scene further exposes how gendered hierarchies shape the economy of desire within performance-based labour, where the line between seduction as craft and seduction as coercion becomes dangerously thin. As Bleuwenn Lechaux notes, “playing the game” is an unspoken expectation for women performers, who must constantly calibrate how much flirtation is professionally required while also bearing the social responsibility if such performances are read as invitations to sexual behaviour or violence. This dynamic illustrates the contradictions of consent and agency in artistic labour, where the creative expression of sexuality and intimacy coexists with persisting structures of coercion.

13These analyses emphasize how the continuum of gender-based violence is inseparable from a continuum of labour exploitation. As Lechaux observes, gender-based violence functions as “violence integrated into a continuum of occupational discriminations, themselves shaped by the gender order” (p. 163). Recognising this entanglement complicates binary understandings of victimhood and agency. Where gender-based violence is pervasive and naturalised, disidentifying with the label of “victim” may reflect not denial, but a strategy of survival – or even a reframing of discrimination as opportunity within a patriarchal system that rewards compliant femininity. The sociological insight of this collection, thus, lies in exposing not only how creative industries perpetuate gendered harm, but also how workers internalise, rationalise and negotiate these conditions.

Critical Assessment

14Among the collection’s greatest strengths is its cohesive and incisive theoretical framework, which unifies the case studies while allowing for cross-cultural and interdisciplinary nuance. Adopting the term gender-based violence rather than “violence against women” marks an important theoretical advance. It moves beyond essentialist framings that position men as inherent aggressors and women as natural victims, reconfiguring gender itself as “a social relationship and a system of power relations [that] is the organising principle of violence” (p. 7). The application of Liz Kelly’s theorisation of gender-based violence as a continuum enables a nuanced understanding of how gender-based violence operates within creative industries. By emphasising the elusive nature of everyday sexist practices and the variability of how violence is experienced and perceived, this critical approach opens space for complexity rather than closure. Its strength lies not in delineating categorical boundaries, but in revealing the subtle mechanisms through which violence is normalised, silenced or rendered invisible.

15Equally compelling is the volume’s embodiment of feminist praxis. The contributors make no pretence of political neutrality; instead, they foreground the underlying political dimensions of their scholarship. As they write, “The political aim, whether explicitly declared or not, is to expose and dismantle the mechanisms and structures maintaining the gendered order in the arts” (p. 14). This refusal of detached empiricism – echoing the Second Wave conviction that “the personal is political” – feels especially urgent in an academic landscape where research is often pressured toward apolitical objectivity. Grounded with explicit ethical commitment, the contributors remind readers that research itself is political, situated within the very structures it seeks to critique.

16Part III exemplifies this praxis in action. Rather than stopping at diagnosis, the concluding chapters document strategies of resistance and reform emerging within artistic institutions – from collective denunciations and intimacy coordination to grassroots organising. In doing so, the collection demonstrates how feminist inquiry can contribute not only to understanding structural violence but to transforming the conditions that sustain it. Gender-Based Violence in the Arts and Culture thus stands as both scholarship and call to action: a model of research that interrogates the systemic nature of harm while enacting the politics of care and accountability it advocates.

17Despite these considerable achievements, the volume is not without limitations – the most significant being the narrowness of its empirical scope. While the depth of its case studies across five countries and multiple sectors is impressive, the focus falls primarily on professionalised, institution-based art worlds situated within late-capitalist cultural economies and dominated by middle-class workers. This emphasis risks overlooking how gender-based violence and labour exploitation unfold within more community-oriented, amateur, rural and subaltern creative spaces. It also reflects a predominantly Euro-American perspective, as the absence of research from the Global South remains a notable gap. Including case studies from Latin America, Africa and South Asia would not simply diversify the geography of analysis but significantly deepen understandings of how gender-based violence takes shape under differing social, political and economic conditions.

18Another limitation concerns the treatment of gender and sexual diversity. Though the editors acknowledge the lack of LGBTQIA+ data, the issue remains largely unexplored. This omission – despite the contributors’ intention – raises important questions on methodology: were gender and sexual minorities excluded through recruitment networks, or through conceptual frameworks that implicitly centre cisgender, heteronormative experiences of violence? While the book’s definition of gender-based violence is inclusive of non-heteronormative identities, its analysis does not address how homophobia, transphobia or other systemic discrimination against non-normative gender expression shape everyday experiences of violence. These omissions reflect not only the limitations of the volume, but also structural blind spots in current scholarship on gender-based violence in arts and culture. Greater attention to these perspectives would extend the continuum of gender-based violence beyond heterosexually coded dynamics of desire and power, revealing how such violence also operates through erasure, ridicule and exclusion.

Conclusion

19Gender-Based Violence in the Arts and Culture: Perspectives on Education and Work is a profoundly thoughtful and urgently needed intervention into the study of gender-based violence within artistic and cultural worlds, where silence, shame and fear have long obscured abuse, and where the very nature of artistic practice has too often been invoked to justify or romanticise it. The collection’s contributors demonstrate both analytical depth and ethical commitment, engaging with interlocutors across diverse creative sectors to show that even the most sensitive topics can and must be examined through rigorous and accountable scholarship.

20The volume provides a compelling framework for understanding how gender-based violence is embedded within the institutional, aesthetic and affective structures of artistic labour. Its theoretical coherence and comparative methodology establish a strong foundation for future interdisciplinary research. Moving forward, the book’s insights could be expanded through more intersectional and transnational approaches, incorporating perspectives from the Global South and LGBTQIA+ artists, alongside analyses attentive to race, ethnicity and class. Taken together, the collection’s intellectual rigour, sustained community engagement and feminist commitment to exposing and dismantling the mechanisms that perpetuate gendered power relations in the arts make it both a model of feminist praxis and a vital resource for those seeking to transform the conditions of creative life.

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Notes

1 Liz Kelly, “The Continuum of Sexual Violence,” in Jalna Hanmer and Mary Maynard (eds.), Women, Violence and Social Control, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 1987, pp. 46-60.

2 Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 1989, Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press.

3 Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran (eds.), Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness, New York, Basic Books, 1971, pp. 1-39.

4 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1978.

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Christina Misaki Nikitin, « “Uncovering the Shadows Beneath Creative Industries”: A Review of Marie Buscatto, Sari Karttunen and Mathilde Provansal (eds.), Gender-Based Violence in Arts and Culture: Perspectives on Education and Work, Cambridge, UK, Open Book Publishers, 2025 »Transtext(e)s Transcultures 跨文本跨文化 [En ligne], 19 | 2024, mis en ligne le 30 décembre 2024, consulté le 16 mars 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transtexts/2778 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15baj

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Auteur

Christina Misaki Nikitin

Christina Misaki Nikitin is a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology at Harvard University. Their research focuses on the aesthetic, cultural and political dimensions of musical subcultures in Japan. Their dissertation explores how queer and trans* performers negotiate, subvert and reappropriate majoritarian discourses on gender, sexuality, race and national belonging through popular song. They received the 2024 Charles Seeger Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology for their paper, “Fūzoku Queens: Trans* Migrant Sex Performers in Tokyo,” which examines the creative artistry and performative labor of sex work in queer underground scenes. Christina is currently guest co-editing, with Alejandrina M. Medina and Paul David Flood, a forthcoming Women and Music special issue on global queer/trans nightlives.

Christina Misaki Nikitin est doctorante en ethnomusicologie à l’université Harvard. Ses travaux de recherche portent sur les dimensions esthétiques, culturelles et politiques des sous-cultures musicales au Japon. Sa thèse explore la manière dont les artistes queer et trans* négocient, subvertissent et se réapproprient les discours majoritaires relatifs au genre, à la sexualité, à la race et à l’appartenance nationale à travers la chanson populaire. Elle a reçu le prix Charles Seeger 2024 de la Société d’ethnomusicologie pour son article “Fūzoku Queens: Trans* migrant sex performers in Tokyo”, qui examine la créativité artistique et le travail performatif des travailleuses du sexe dans les scènes underground queer. Elle coédite actuellement, avec Alejandrina M. Medina et Paul David Flood, un numéro spécial de la revue Women and Music consacré à la vie nocturne queer/trans dans le monde.

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