It Hurts!

Psychoanalysis, the study of the unconscious, has provided artists in the 20th and 21st centuries with both a visual language and valuable psychological tools to address the social phenomenon of violence against women. The volume presents groundbreaking research on various representations of gender-based violence in art. The book aims to examine the cultural constructions embedded in this phenomenon and to explore the different strategies that have been developed on different continents to counteract it. The artists featured are Oskar Kokoschka, María Izquierdo, Grete Stern, Dorothea Tanning, Ana Mendieta, Kiki Kogelnik, Marina Abramović, Soli Kiani, Sigalit Landau, and Hava Raucher, as well as the filmmaker Ruth Beckermann and the philosopher Hélène Cixous.

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With contributions in English and German and German and English abstracts

Elana Shapira, cultural and art historian and lecturer at the Cultural Studies department at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, author of Style and Seduction: Jewish Patrons, Architecture and Design in Fin de Siècle Vienna (2016), editor of Design Dialogue (2018), Designing Transformation (2021) and the forthcoming Austrian Identity and Modernity (2025), and co-editor of Freud and the Émigré (2020), Gestalterinnen. Frauen, Design und Gesellschaft im Wien der Zwischenkriegszeit (2023) and the forthcoming Ella Briggs (2025).

Daniela Finzi, literary and cultural scholar, head of the research department of the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna and member of the board of the Sigmund Freud Foundation, author of Unterwegs zum Anderen? Literarische Er-Fahrungen der kriegerischen Auflösung Jugoslawiens aus deutschsprachiger Perspektive (2013), and co-editor of Dora, Hysteria and Gender (2020), Freud and the Émigré (2020), and Freud. Berggasse 19 (2020).