Lopez: In the wake of an international, male-led smear campaign against Alma Lopez’s 1999 digital print, Lopez’s commentary offers insight into the underlying patriarchal ethos which disables a portion of our society from seeing “Our Lady” as anything other than a “tart”, “stripper”, and “devil.”

Latorre: In Guisela Latorre’s piece we see how the double exclusion of Chicana women from both patriarchal discourse and the White, middle-upper class-oriented feminist movement gave rise to politicizing and decolonizing methods of creativity in the world of Chicana art.

This week’s readings for our class interestingly coincide with a handful of articles assigned in my WGST Women and Health course, specifically on the topic of “rape culture.” The great sense of horror that I felt reading through Alma Lopez’s piece about the threat of censorship by art institutions, the vilification of the female body, and the candid condemnation of any threat to a patriarchal, Chicano society is almost identical to the feelings I experienced reading through an article on “rape culture” in India.

The WGST article that I am specifically referring to was written in response to the tragic gang rape that occurred on a public bus in New Delhi late last year.

(http://prospect.org/article/purity-culture-rape-culture)

Just above, I’ve posted the link about this barbaric crime to help initiate my argument that the hostile, cultural climate that Alma Lopez describes in her article, Silencing Our Lady, parallels the “rape culture,” (referenced in the link) that maintains a sense of entitlement for men to denounce women and their bodies as inferior, defiant, and worthy of corrective abuse.

According to my WGST article entitled, Purity Culture is Rape Culture, rape, in its modern form, is not about sex, it is about power. “Rape culture lives anywhere that has a ‘traditional’ vision of women’s sexuality. A culture in which women are expected to remain virgins until marriage is a rape culture. In that vision, women’s bodies are for use primarily for procreation or male pleasure. They must be kept pure…This attitude gives men license to patrol-in some cases with violence- women’s hopes for controlling their lives and bodies.”

Referring back to Lopez’s article we see this concept of “rape culture” play out comfortably in the society that she grew up in. A society in which woman’s bare breasts, exposed legs and belly are seen as “offensive” and blasphemous while the male nude is anointed as god-like in countless religious institutions across the nation sounds a lot like a society that promotes violence against women.  A society wherein a rape survivor who to tell her story is held “on trial” for putting herself in a dangerous situation sounds a lot like Lopez’s reality. Any society that is threatened by the voice and agency of women is definitely a society that we should be concerned about.

I suppose I write all of this to say that I am just as disturbed by Lopez’s testimony as I am by the countless articles I read on the normalcy of rape in patriarchal societies. I feel relieved by the fact that the art institution chose not to remove Lopez’s work, despite the violent opposition. However, in the end, it is the sizable body of people who fervently resist the right of a woman to create a positive and empowering image of herself that really makes me shutter.