TAKE BACK the FIGHT Resisting Sexual Violence from the Ground Up

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Date:

Friday, February 02, 2018

Time:

6:00 PM - 9:00 PM

Event Type:

Concert/Show

Organizer/Author:

SubRosa Community Space

Location Details:

SubRosa Community Space
703 Pacific Ave, Santa Cruz, California 95060

“We do not believe that rape can end within the present capitalist, racist, and sexist structures of our society. The fight against rape must be waged simultaneously with the fight against all other forms of oppression.”

C. ~ 1970’s Letter to the Anti Rape Movement From Santa Cruz Women Against Rape

SubRosa is collaborating with Felix Kulpa II, Interference Archive, Lesbian Herstory Archives, and What Goes up must come down, to exhibit Take Back the Fight: Resisting Sexual Violence from the Ground Up. Opening Friday February 2, at 6 pm.

Echoing present tensions within feminist organizing against gender violence, the above quote is pulled from the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, New York. It’s a 1970’s statement of local Santa Cruz organizers, in opposition to trends they saw in mainstream rape activism. This letter will be up at SubRosa for the month of February, grounding our conversations about the history and ongoing struggle of the fight against gender and sexual violence.

Also around the corner at Felix Kulpa II (209 Laurel Street) will be a more in-depth archival exhibition of this dynamic history.

Exhibition Dates:February 2, 2018 – February 24, 2018 (and perhaps longer at SubRosa)

Organizing against sexual violence is intimately linked to struggles for liberation in both public and private spheres. The history of organizing against sexual assault and rape helps us to understand feminist resistance to violence as a collective struggle against patriarchy, and against sexual and gender violence as a function of state violence.

First shown in 2017 at NYC’s Interference Archive, Take Back The Fight focuses on organized responses to gender and sexual violence, highlighting the ways individuals and communities have developed creative and powerful grassroots and noninstitutional justice and healing practices.

For more information about the exhibit & related events please visit:
https://whatgoesup.sites.ucsc.edu/2018/01/16/take-back-the-fight/ &
https://www.facebook.com/events/196286754445155/

In collaboration with: The Interference Archive (NYC) | The Lesbian Herstory Archives | SubRosa Community Space
Financial Support: Arts Council Santa Cruz County | UCSC’s Feminist Studies Department & the History of Consciousness

For more information: https://www.facebook.com/events/1996675690...

Added to the calendar on Wed, Jan 31, 2018 6:32PM

§Take Back The Fight

by What Goes Up, Must Come Down

Wed, Jan 31, 2018 8:28PM

Recovery from trauma after sexual assault is often imagined as a personal, internal experience. However, an exclusive focus on individual narratives of victimization and healing can obscure decades of collective, grassroots struggle by and on behalf of sexual assault survivors. Rape is not an isolated experience, but a pervasive form of violence that acts in concert with oppression in the workforce, at home, and in medical and academic institutions–as well as with structural racism, homophobia, transphobia, and capitalism. Likewise, organizing against sexual violence is intimately linked to struggles for liberation in both public and private spheres. The history of organizing against sexual assault and rape helps us to understand feminist resistance to violence as a collective struggle against patriarchy, and sexual and gender violence as a function of state violence.

Take Back the Fight: Resisting Sexual Violence from the Ground Up, Interference Archive’s in summer 2017 exhibition in Brooklyn, New York will be in Santa Cruz at the Felix Kulpa II Gallery for the month of February 2018. The exhibition focuses on organized responses to gender and sexual violence, highlighting the ways individuals and communities have developed creative and powerful grassroots and non-institutional justice and healing practices. A collaboration with Lesbian Herstory Archives, Take Back the Fight narrates intersecting histories of activism by and on behalf of survivors of sexual violence and their communities. The exhibition will coincide with a series of public events in order to collectively engage with the exhibition material, relating the histories presented to ongoing efforts to end and heal from sexual violence.

Archival materials in this exhibition are primarily drawn from the collections of the Interference Archive and Lesbian Herstory Archives. Taken as a whole, these documents reveal both the breadth of organizing against sexual violence and its fragmented, conflictual history, echoes of which continue to be felt in contemporary feminism. The exhibition makes visible some of the fault lines that developed between activists: the pornography debates of the “Sex Wars,” the limits of single-issue organizing, and conflicts and tensions around whether to work within state institutions or develop community-centered justice models.

Archival materials are complemented by materials created by contemporary artist/activists. These will include a quilt from The Monument Quilt, an evolving collection of stories from survivors of rape and abuse; and Bordados (embroideries) by the organization Bordamos Feminicidios based in Mexico created in response to feminicide.

This exhibition situates multiple histories of resistance to sexual violence within a broader narrative of feminist, anti-racist, and queer activism. It presents strategies of resistance, both

https://whatgoesup.sites.ucsc.edu/2018/01/...

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