1. Introduction: A Comprehensive Understanding of Gender-Based Violence in Artistic and Cultural Worlds

Marie Buscatto, Sari Karttunen and
Mathilde Provansal

©2025 M. Buscatto, S. Karttunen & M. Provansal, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0436.01

Denouncing Sexual Violence in the Arts:
A Loud Social Phenomenon

In October 2017, dozens of women made accusations of sexual violence against the cinema producer Harvey Weinstein (Kantor & Twohey, 2017; Farrow, 2017). Shortly after, upon the invitation of the actor Alyssa Milano, thousands of women shared their experiences of gender-based violence on social media under the hashtag #MeToo, using the name of the movement against sexual violence experienced by women of colour founded by the African American activist Tarana Burke. Sexual violence in the arts is far from being a ‘red-carpet issue’ involving only renowned male film directors and famous actors and actresses (Alcalde & Villa, 2022). In many locations all over the world, the past eight years have been marked by numerous denunciations of cases of sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape, mainly committed by men against women, in a large range of artistic and cultural work and education contexts. To name a few examples among many others, the website ‘Paye ta note’1 as well as the French collectives ‘metoothéâtre’ (Haymann & Brzezowska-Dudek, 2022) and ‘metooartcontemporain’2 have shared testimonies of sexism and sexual violence affecting female artists and ‘support personnel’ in these ‘art worlds’ (Becker, 1982). Whether in cinema, live performance arts, music, visual arts or dance, no artistic or cultural milieu has escaped this phenomenon, not even the most feminised ones.

Breaking the code of silence has unsettled the image of artistic and cultural circles as being open, egalitarian and avant-garde. In reaction to this, several actions and movements, sometimes involving renowned artists, have contested the politicisation and feminist analysis of these forms of violence against women. For example, shortly after the Weinstein affair, a hundred women mainly working in cultural and artistic spheres signed a manifesto in the French newspaper Le Monde defending ‘a freedom to bother, indispensable to sexual freedom’3 (Le Monde, 2018). Fortunately, these denunciations were also accompanied by the creation of feminist collectives and tools to fight gender-based violence in the arts and culture, such as the artist-led movement ENGAGEMENT fighting ‘sexual harassment, sexism and abuse of power in the Belgian arts field’.4

Gender-based violence affects all kinds of artistic and cultural workplaces and educational institutions across many countries, which suggests that they are neither isolated incidents nor the consequences of a few individual deviant men. Instead, it reveals the systemic character of gender-based violence (Walby, 2013) in artistic and cultural worlds.

The #MeToo movement highlighted pervasive issues of sexual harassment, gender inequality and power dynamics in the artistic and cultural sectors, promising a significant reshaping of gender relations. However, the rise of ‘anti-woke’ sentiment casts doubt on #MeToo’s lasting impact, and critical research is needed to assess the extent of changes in the gendered order. Overall, more studies are needed to approach gender-based violence as a systemic issue in the art worlds. While gender inequalities in art worlds are well documented by academic research, the identification and explanation of gender-based violence in artistic and cultural sectors remain underexplored. Based on ambitious case studies in several artistic and cultural domains—opera, popular and electronic music, visual arts, screen industries, photography and theatre—and across a wide range of countries—Finland, France, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States—this book aims to fill this gap.

In this introductory chapter, we first examine the current state of the art in the analysis of gender inequalities and gender-based violence in artistic and cultural work and education before presenting the key contributions of this book to a comprehensive understanding of gender-based violence in artistic and cultural work and education.

In the past twenty years, multiple researchers in sociology, historical and cultural studies have examined how certain artistic and cultural art worlds are feminised while others remain masculine (Buscatto, 2021; Flinn, 2024; Harris & Giuffre, 2015; Hatzipetrou-Andronikou, 2018; Ravet, 2011; Steedman, 2024). They have explored the main social processes maintaining male privileges and women’s subordination in artistic and cultural worlds (Bielby, 2009; Brook et al., 2020; Buscatto, 2018; Gill, 2014; Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2015; Provansal, 2023, 2024; Ramstedt, 2024; Stokes, 2015; Wreyford, 2018) and how these hierarchies are being obscured, naturalised and legitimised (Banks & Milestone, 2011; Buscatto, 2021; Gill, 2011; Jones & Pringles, 2015; Miller, 2016). They have also studied how gender inequality regimes intersect with other systems of inequality related to class, race, sexuality and age to stratify artists and cultural workers and their artistic and cultural production (Bull, 2019; Bull & Scharff, 2023; Buscatto et al, 2020; Provansal, 2020; Saha, 2018). They have identified the social, economic and political resources, the individual and collective strategies as well as the institutional measures that allow some women to survive in these extremely competitive and uncertain environments, and even to reach high levels of artistic reputation and economic remuneration (Buscatto, 2018; Karttunen, 2009; Provansal, 2023; Steedman, 2024).

Some scholars studying gender inequality in arts and culture have noticed, in their fieldwork, that female art students, artists and cultural intermediaries experience sexist practices and sexual violence. But, until now, very few scholars conducted fieldwork that explicitly focuses on gender-based violence in certain artistic and cultural sectors and connected their findings to the rich, yet ‘fragmented’ literature (Walby, 2013) on gender-based violence. Before presenting the state of the art related to this topic, let us discuss the key concepts of ‘gender-based violence’ and ‘the continuum of sexual violence’ developed in gender studies literature.

A Legacy of Feminist Thinking and Feminist Movements

Second-wave feminist movements and feminist thinking have helped to render visible the silenced experiences of sexual violence and to understand their social meaning. Challenging biological determinism and individualised approaches to violence against women, feminist thinkers reframed the issue, emphasising its systemic character and its inscription in gendered relations of power.

In the late seventies, British sociologist Jalna Hanmer (1977) stated that violence against women, and the fear of violence, is a form of social control by men over women and a way to maintain women’s subordination. Violence, and the threat of violence, contribute to exclude women from certain social areas (investing certain occupations, for example), to restrict their fields of possibility (limiting their geographic mobility or artistic freedom), and to force them to behave in a certain way (‘shut down the seduction’ when interacting with cultural intermediaries (Buscatto, 2021)). Furthermore, Hanmer argued that ‘not only should a definition of violence be based on the perspective of the victim, but that women’s definitions covered a wide spectrum of abuses’ (Hanmer & Maynard, 1987, p. 6).

Exploring the ‘Continuum of Sexual Violence’ as Conceptualised by Kelly

Pressure, abuse and coercion are also central to Liz Kelly’s definition of ‘the continuum of sexual violence’ (Kelly, 1987). The concept makes it possible to describe the extent of women’s experiences of sexual violence, from the everyday and routine intimate violations to criminalised and lethal forms of violence, affecting women across a lifetime, and to articulate them with the perpetuation of women’s oppression. Kelly emphasises as well that a study of violence should be based on women’s subjective experience and definition of violence rather than on the use of discrete categories organised along their degree of gravity.

Scholars have thus examined how the definition and the identification of sexual violence may change over time and vary according to social, cultural, political and legal contexts. For example, in a study conducted with editorial workers from two types of magazines—a feminist magazine and a heterosexual male pornographic magazine—Kirsten Dellinger and Christine Williams (2002) explore how the identification and the labelling of experiences of unwanted sexual behaviours as sexual harassment depend on the organisational culture and workplace norms. Comparing the social, cultural, legal and political contexts of the definition of sexual harassment in the United States and France, Abigail Saguy (2000) underlines that it is defined as a discrimination based on sex in American law while considered as a form of sexual violence in France, and that the consequences of such behaviours are very different for their perpetrator in these two national contexts. Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) has also argued that women’s experiences of violence and the way they are handled, or not, by political discourses and practices, depend on women’s location at the intersection of several systems of inequality related to gender, class and race.

Feminist activists and researchers have identified and studied a large range of categories of violence (sexism, sexual harassment, rape, domestic violence, incest, cyber-harassment, femicide, etc.) exerted in diverse social contexts and locations (family, public space, higher education, work, social media, etc.) and perpetrated in a great majority by men against women. The development of research on gender and violence and the implementation of public policies to prevent and fight violence went along with the multiplication of categories to name it and the spread of ‘umbrella terms’ (Boyle, 2018) in the academic, activist, media and political spheres.

‘Violence against women’, ‘men’s violence against women’, ‘male violence against women’, ‘patriarchal violence against women’, ‘sexist and sexual violence’, ‘gender-based violence’: the choice of a category comes with advantages and limitations. The first three expressions place the focus on the identity of the victims and/or of the perpetrators of violence. Unlike ‘violence against women’, which implies women’s vulnerability, talking about ‘men’s violence against women’ emphasises men’s responsibility (Boyle, 2018), violence against women being predominantly committed by men. But it may convey an essentialist explanation of violence, men being the aggressors and women the victims ‘by nature’. In 1993, the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women defined ‘violence against women’ as ‘any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in physical, sexual, or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life’.5 Prevalence research has shown the pervasiveness of violence in women’s lives (Brown et al., 2020). However, there have been recent debates about extending the theoretical frameworks of gender-based violence to analyse violence against children (Whittier, 2016), gender and sexual minorities (Brown et al., 2020) and minoritised groups of men (Peretz & Vidmar, 2021). ‘Patriarchal violence against women’ tends to be used by scholars working on violence occurring in the family, such as domestic violence and incest, to ‘point at the social system that underpins them’6 and in which women’s work and bodies are exploited by men (Giacinti et al., 2024, p. 4). The distinction between sexist violence and sexual violence in the fourth expression hides the continuum of the different forms of violence experienced by women.

These limitations compelled us to use the notion of ‘gender-based violence’ to emphasise that gender, as a social relationship and a system of power relations, is the organising principle of violence and to consider a diversity of victims targeted because of their sex, their gender identity or gender performance, and their sexual orientation. Gender-based violence refers to all forms of violence, whether verbal, physical, sexual, psychological or economical, interpersonal or institutional, committed in both public and private spheres against people due to their claimed or assigned gender identity, sexual orientation, or location in the hierarchy of masculinities.7 All contributing chapters in Gender-Based Violence in Arts and Culture: Perspectives on Education and Work articulate an analysis of violence through the lens of gender inequalities and gendered power relations at play within artistic and cultural work and educational contexts.

Despite the richness of the literature on gender-based violence, very few studies have documented and addressed the forms, meanings and consequences of violence perpetrated against women and gender and sexual minorities in the artistic and cultural worlds. And as mentioned above, despite the growing visibility of the topic, few researchers specialised in these fields have explored the experiences of women and gender and sexual minorities with gender-based violence. And when they did, they primarily focused on the various forms of physical, verbal and non-verbal sexual harassment in artistic and cultural work, and to a lesser extent, in educational settings within the arts and culture sectors. A number of common findings emerge from these limited studies.

First, researchers have described the prevalence of sexual harassment in artistic and cultural workplaces (Crowley, 2021; Hennekam & Bennett, 2017; Idås et al., 2020). They have underlined that female workers in these environments are much more affected by sexual harassment than their male colleagues, and employees from other sectors (Kleppe & Røyseng, 2016; North, 2016).

Second, they have reported how sexual harassment produces and is the product of gender inequality and gender relations in artistic and creative occupations (Buscatto et al., 2021; Crowley, 2021; Giuffre & Harris, 2019; Hennekam & Bennett, 2017; North, 2016). And they have identified, in the organisational culture, the organisation of work and the structures of employment, some factors and mechanisms sustaining sexual harassment in the artistic and creative industries. Sexualised workplaces, working processes and the content of artistic work blur the lines between what is considered a normal part of the job and what constitutes sexual harassment, making it more difficult to identify and report sexual harassment (Dellinger & Williams, 2002; Giuffre & Harris, 2019; Hennekam & Bennett, 2017). For example, in the theatre world, the line between work expectations and abusive behaviours is not easy to draw because the work of both male and female actors relies on attraction, intimacy and eroticism (Kleppe & Røyseng, 2016). ‘Ambiguous industry demands’, the valorisation of ‘edginess’ and the emphasis on artistic requirements contribute to obscuring reprehensible behaviours in the modelling industry as well (Crowley, 2021). Additionally, the celebration of talent, genius and charismatic authority perpetuates a tolerance of sexual harassment in artistic and cultural work and education. This tolerance is shared by victims, co-workers and superiors, enabling it to remain an essential aspect of the occupational culture of classical music (Trachman, 2018), the media industry (North, 2016) and the creative industries (Hennekam & Bennett, 2017). Patti Giuffre and Deborah Harris (2019) have described how, in the culinary industry, abusive behaviour by male ‘creative genius’ chefs is tolerated, or even excused, due to their professional success and creative abilities; restaurateur and author Jen Agg coined the term ‘genius asshole’ to explain how this trope helps to trivialise such behaviour. Finally, the individualisation of careers, intense competition for work, precarious employment situations and recruitment practices via informal professional networks put female workers in a vulnerable situation and make them dependent on men in positions of power able to make and break careers (Crowley, 2021; Hennekam & Bennett, 2017; Kleppe & Røyseng, 2016; Trachman, 2018).

A third key finding, linked to these structural work and employment factors, is the low proportion of women denouncing cases of sexual harassment because of the fear of retaliation and the potential negative outcomes on their career, and because of the lack of structures and procedures for reporting it (Dellinger & Williams, 2002; Giuffre & Harris, 2019; Idås et al., 2020; Kleppe & Røyseng, 2016; North, 2016; Trachman, 2018). As a result, some women feel compelled to leave their cultural and artistic careers, reflecting the broader structural barriers that prevent them from fully participating in these fields.

Despite their meaningful contributions, these works have some limitations, which prompted us to develop this collective book to thoroughly assess and explain gender-based violence in those environments. Most studies focus mainly on the experiences of gender-based violence of women already working in the arts and we know very little about the effects of gender-based violence in artistic education on the perpetuation of gender inequality in artistic careers. While several structural factors enabling and sustaining gender-based violence have been identified, their consequences for the access to artistic and cultural work, artistic careers and for creativity remain under-investigated. Most researchers also adopt an extensive definition of the creative industries or the artistic sectors, making it more difficult to describe precisely how these mechanisms operate within particular cultural and artistic work contexts. Furthermore, the analyses tend to focus solely on sexual harassment rather than investigating ‘the continuum of sexual violence’ as suggested by Kelly (1987), and do not always distinguish between gender-based violence, gender inequality and discrimination. Some studies also focus not on women’s own experiences but rather on their views about sexual harassment in their occupational environment. Finally, we know very little about how gender-based violence is experienced by ethno-racial, gender and sexual minorities, and challenged in these fields.

Based on seven case studies conducted in several artistic and cultural worlds—opera, visual arts, popular music, screen industries, photography and theatre—and a wide range of countries—Finland, France, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States—this book thus aims to deal with these limitations by offering a comprehensive sociological, cultural and feminist analysis of gender-based violence in artistic and cultural education and work. To do so, the authors address several issues. First, they open the analysis of gender-based violence not only to criminal offences such as rape, sexual violence, harassment or assault, but also to everyday sexism as part of a continuum of sexual violence. Secondly, they document the contexts, structures, power relations and routine practices that enable and sustain gender-based violence in artistic and cultural sectors. Analysing its historical foundations and social logics, the authors emphasise its structural character against commonly held psychologising and individualising explanations. Third, they study how gender-based violence is being silenced and normalised. Fourth, they reveal the social conditions, practices, measures and strategies used to challenge, denounce, address and stop gender-based violence. Last but not least, they offer and discuss multiple, original methodologies for studying gender-based violence. In the remaining sections of this introduction, we will briefly address how the key insights were systematically uncovered through these case studies.

The research presented in this book is not based on one-off projects but rather on entire academic careers dedicated to studying artistic labour markets and gender issues. And this deep and long-term knowledge enriches the authors’ study of gender-based violence in several ways.

Historically, quantification has been a way to objectify and to document the extent of gender-based violence. This is not the case when it comes to arts and cultural sectors, where very few quantitative studies, if any, have been conducted by researchers, governmental institutions, artistic institutions and activists, in those sectors, mostly due to high costs and lack of human resources. To frame the case studies within their specific contexts, the authors necessarily draw on industry statistics, underscoring their significance in the pursuit of equality. However, while acknowledging the importance of ‘feminist counting’, they all seek to delve deeper beyond just statistics of equality. Achieving a simple male-female balance may not fully capture the complexities of gender dynamics, power structures and intersectional inequalities that shape women’s and gender and sexual minorities’ experiences and opportunities in the arts. Indeed, the focus of the seven chapters oscillates between everyday practices and their structural foundations while the methodologies they use could be described as feminist, and share a politically activist orientation. Consequently, calls for research participation were often spread, in part, with assistance from feminist associations or groups in the arts. As opposed to general studies conducted in creative industries, this epistemological approach allows for ‘thick’ descriptions of gender-based violence as well as for a deep understanding of its causes and its consequences.

Moreover, most authors in the book acknowledge that their samples are not fully representative, often comprising a relatively low number of respondents and exhibiting a bias toward individuals interested in gender issues and with personal experience. And this choice, based on a strong knowledge of the artistic or cultural worlds being investigated, is key in their ability to identify gender-based violence in its complexity. The researchers have then used various measures to include not just those who identify as female and victims, but to embed the research within a comprehensive understanding of the underlying structures and the workings of gender-based violence. Not all authors aim for generalisability; instead, they focus on providing nuanced, contextual analyses that describe ‘some of the ways in which content and workplace culture interact and explore[s] new directions for thinking about the questions raised’, as Anna Bull states in her chapter (Chapter 6). Interestingly, many of these apparently non-generalisable observations and findings recur in other art fields and countries throughout the book.

Thanks to their deep and long-term knowledge of the art sector, the researchers are thus able to give a rich and detailed view of what is at stake in these fields, enhancing our knowledge about contexts and structural processes enabling violence as well as about the meaning of such experiences for victims. It allows the authors to contextualise their findings by drawing on their extensive experience in researching the artistic sectors and their operational logics and could thus exceed the limits of quantification. The following four sections outline the four main findings this book brings to the study of gender-based violence in artistic and cultural work and education.

First of all, this book brings to light the many ways gender-based violence occurs in artistic and cultural worlds. By doing so, it reveals how these spaces are conducive to gender-based violence through many ordinary, and sometimes invisible, practices. The case studies demonstrate that while those practices may seem innocuous, and are sometimes even invisible to people who experience or witness them, they participate in creating an educational or professional world laden with gender-based violence. Thanks to a thorough description of gender-based violence in its various forms, along Kelly’s ‘continuum of gender-based violence’, the case studies also describe in detail a wide range of sexist and sexual behaviours which constitute the daily, ordinary experience of many female students and professionals in artistic and cultural sectors.

For instance, using a detailed questionnaire describing many different potential sexist and sexual acts in their study of gender-based violence in the French opera world (Chapter 2), Marie Buscatto, Soline Helbert and Ionela Roharik reveal that not only do many practices participate in creating a gender-based violent art world (more than three-quarters of respondents reported having experienced an act of gender-based violence as victims), but also that the range of acts is very numerous, from sexist remarks, insistent flirting, sexist jokes or obscene, saucy and embarrassing comments to unwanted touching of sexual or erogenous areas, or sexual assault. Interviews conducted with female and male singers confirmed that sexist practices were not only part of the daily life of opera workers, but that even those of them who initially claimed not to be victims and witnesses of such sexist acts were, in fact, experiencing them in their daily lives without recognising them as such. Thanks to an extensive collection of many gender-based violence acts, most of them being considered sexist, this case study shows how strongly the French opera world fosters gender-based violence.

Another instance here is the qualitative study carried out in the Japanese popular music industry by Chiharu Chujo: ‘when asked in the context of a more nuanced understanding of “sexual harassment”—including manifestations such as sexist remarks, persistent flirtation and derogatory jokes about sexuality or appearance—respondents clearly confirmed recurrent encounters with such incidents’ (Chapter 3). While those interviewees did not consider those practices as sexual harassment at first (and thus worth denouncing or even mentioning to an interviewer conducting a study on sexual harassment), they did describe such situations freely when specifically asked about them. And the ways they described those sexist practices clearly indicated that those practices were mostly tolerated by women on a daily basis, not because they were harmless or insignificant, but because of power relations (such as hierarchy and client/customer relationships) that constrained them to accept the practices. They developed tactical ways to try to protect themselves from being harmed—from escaping those situations to accepting them as inevitable. But overall, only a few of them reacted actively to fight them, and this happened only when they could use their professional legitimacy gained over time or benefit from the support of strong networks. Through a study designed to elicit testimonies extending the definition of gender-based violence to daily sexist practices, Chujo was able to not only describe how conducive to gender-based violence the Japanese music industry is (including the experience of sexual violence as such), but also how difficult it is for women to escape such a gender-based violent world. The same can be said of all the artistic and cultural worlds explored in this book, from the Helsinki School, a Finnish photography training and branding initiative (Chapter 5), to the French contemporary art education scene (Chapter 4) and the New York theatre world (Chapter 7).

It should be noted here that the strong involvement of the researchers in gender issues made this empirical approach possible. Indeed, even if in the aftermath of #MeToo, research participants are supposedly more inclined to discuss their experiences of gender-based violence, they are still at risk of losing work opportunities if their identities are revealed, because of the gendered power dynamics prevalent in most art worlds. And this is even more important in artistic and cultural worlds where reputations are at stake, and precarity and instability are key elements in the development of one’s career. The instances of violence may have been traumatic for the interviewees, demanding special sensitivity from the interviewer, as clearly exemplified in Bull’s strategy of acknowledging potential trauma in her interviewing techniques while studying gender-based violence in screen industries fields (Chapter 6). Extra measures have been used to ensure the confidentiality and anonymity of the research participants, unless those participants had already expressed their points of view in the media, as was the case in Leena-Maija Rossi and Sari Karttunen’s study of sexual harassment in the Helsinki School (Chapter 5).

The Production of Gender-Based Violence as the Result of Cumulative Social Processes

A second contribution of the case studies presented in this book is expanding our understanding of the social processes which produce such an omnipresence of gender-based violence in artistic and cultural education and work. While the authors are genuinely interested in the experiences of workers and students, they aim to go further and uncover the underlying structures which enable those experiences to happen and to be tolerated even when harmful to the victims. They seek ‘to report on the social conditions which allow the production of gender-based violence and grasp its various sociological dimensions’, as described by Buscatto, Helbert and Roharik (Chapter 2). The political aim, whether explicitly declared or not, is to expose and dismantle the mechanisms and structures maintaining the gendered order in the arts. Gender-based violence is not treated as a marginal, interpersonal or private issue, but as a form of social control that contributes to the subordination of women and gender and sexual minorities in the arts.

For instance, Mathilde Provansal shows how varied cumulative social processes participate in producing various forms of gender-based violence in the French elite art school she investigated (Chapter 4): ‘A first social process providing a “conducive context” (Kelly, 2016) for gender-based violence is the sexualisation of female students in a context of “hierarchised gender diversity” (Cardi et al., 2005). The last expression refers to the unequal distribution of power and authority between men and women within art schools’. While women tend to be a majority as students, men tend to act as teachers, but more to the point, sexualisation of female students tends to be a norm which affects all their encounters and educational resources, from recruitment to training to job opportunities. And the same phenomenon is observed in all the artistic and cultural worlds studied in this book, whatever the level of feminisation—music, theatre, visual arts, photography or screen industries.

Moreover, Provansal observes a strong dependency of students on their instructors to launch their careers: as is also the case in all art sectors, men in power are key in opening doors and assuring the artist’s future, whatever the stage of her career. Another social process which participates in producing such gender-based violent art worlds is the blurred boundaries between the private, educational and professional spheres. Not only are many events which could be considered as private—cocktails, dinners, holidays, love relationships—an integral part of artistic lives, but the production of artworks is based on the mobilisation of intimate experiences and bodies whether they consist in visual or photographic artworks, musical or theatrical performances.

Last but not least, very few public policies and procedures enable victims or witnesses to denounce gender-based violence in open, safe and transparent contexts. We should note once more that the strong involvement of Provansal in this art school as a researcher in the long run enabled her to identify the social processes that contribute towards the production and perpetuation of a violent gender-based art world. Indeed, the data collection spanned from 2014 to 2022: over this long period of time, she conducted interviews with art school graduates and personnel, an ethnography of entrance exam, and analysed documents produced by feminist art student and teacher collectives.

The case studies presented in this book explore the many ways gender-based violence affects women’s careers. One obvious consequence is that some women, confronted with sexist practices or subjected to sexual violence, withdraw from such art worlds to avoid further exposure to these practices, as clearly identified in the case study of photography students affiliated with the Helsinki School by Rossi and Karttunen (Chapter 5). Some of them are traumatised and may go through psychological counselling, while others reject such practices and refuse to be part of such sexist and abusive environments. Another consequence is that even those who survive such experiences (as victims or as witnesses) tend to find their professional reputation and the quality of their artworks diminished due to demeaning practices that reduce women to their bodies and sexual appeal, as observed by Provansal in the French elite visual art school she studied (Chapter 4). Some of those women may also refuse to go along with sexist practices and risk losing professional opportunities, labelled as boring, lacking appeal or too loud, as identified by Buscatto, Helbert and Roharik in the context of French opera (Chapter 2).

Another direct and little explored consequence of the inclination of artistic and cultural worlds to gender-based violence is its influence on creative content. In their study of the pervasiveness of sexual harassment in the Finnish photography export and training initiative, the Helsinki School, Rossi and Karttunen show how female photographers were compelled to produce images in which the ‘female bodily capital also emerges as a resource to be used in photographs. For instance, the branding effort has to some extent utilised the bodily capital and aesthetic labour of its female members’ (Chapter 5). In some images, women appeared as powerless victims; in other cases, they were pushed to photograph their nude bodies or to draw on their personal trauma as part of their creative practice. Looking through Helsinki School photo books, and combining visual and textual materials in their analysis, Rossi and Karttunen reached the assessment that ‘several female artists associated with the Helsinki School appear to have been strategically used both for crafting the collective image of the School and enhancing the market success of the branding effort, implying an economic form of gender-based violence’.

Drawing on a study of eighteen workers in the UK screen industries who had been subjected to sexual harassment or violence at work since 2017, Bull focuses ‘on a subset of these accounts in which interviewees described producing content relating to sexuality, gender-based violence or harassment—across journalism, factual entertainment and drama/comedy—at the same time as negotiating sexual harassment or violence within the workplace in which this material was being produced’ (Chapter 6). In some cases, producing such content makes the workplace even more conducive to gender-based violence. In other cases, it becomes a resource for those victims to talk about their traumatic experience and label it as gender-based violence. But overall, the study that this chapter drew on found that few employers of the UK screen industries took an actively anti-sexist approach to workplace culture (Bull, 2023).

These case studies suggest that cultural production under conditions of gendered dependency relations and gender-based violence may shape both the content and form of artistic works, constraining the creative agency of women artists and influencing the narratives and representations they produce. While activist women aim to provide artistic representations that contribute to recognising and denouncing gendered abuse, there are others whose work continues to reaffirm the patriarchal symbolic order (see, for example, Canlı & Mandolini, 2022; Mandolini & Williamson Sinalo, 2023). In sectors such as photographic art (Chapter 5) and the screen industry (Chapter 6), women may be expected, even compelled, to use their bodies, sexual experiences and personal traumas as commodities in their artwork to advance their careers. Moreover, many women engage in producing representations of violence against women within contexts marked by workplace harassment or violence. Further research is necessary to fully understand the impact of these circumstances on women’s creative practices and the representation of gender-based violence in cultural works.

While most of the time women acknowledge that the consequences of gender-based violence are harsh, both psychologically and professionally, they tend not to speak up. And this is the case even when confronted with blatant cases of sexual misconduct which could lead to legal action—sexual harassment, sexual assault or rape. All case studies show that the social processes which make those artistic and cultural worlds conducive to gender-based violence are also silencing the victims. Fear seems to be the common denominator in the production of silence: fear of losing one’s job (or of not being recruited for the next one), fear of being expelled from the artistic and cultural world, fear of being disparaged publicly as too seductive or sexy, fear of being considered as a lousy colleague, fear of being attacked personally, fear of not being believed due to the strong legitimacy of the predator (as, for example, a talented and renowned artist).

In her study of sexual harassment of New York theatre professionals, Bleuwenn Lechaux shows that this constant fear is key in explaining why so few criminal cases are brought to justice despite the development of measures to enable such denunciations (Chapter 7). Her research, conducted through a field survey totalling several weeks spread over the years 2015 and 2017, supplemented by twenty-eight interviews in 2020, builds upon her prior work on theatre professionals in New York and Paris, which involved 126 semi-structured interviews conducted between 2007 and 2010. Through her long-term involvement in this sector, she is able to show that, while the #MeToo movement made the issue of sexual harassment visible and openly legitimated any action against sexual predators, denunciations nonetheless remain infrequent and challenging to engage in for the victims, due to the heavy psychological and professional costs of speaking out. If the exposure of criminal offences has pushed the issue of sexual harassment to the top of the public agenda and procedures for fighting sexual harassment have been formalised (e.g., the Callisto project and tool, intimacy direction through choreographic techniques, pro bono mediation), ‘legal measures nevertheless seem to be of little help in worlds where hiring practices remain governed by the uncertainty and arbitrariness of subjective artistic choices’.

This assessment goes one step further in highlighting the necessity of studying the continuum of violence to better elucidate how criminal sexual offences are integrated into the structural and systemic functioning of artistic and cultural worlds. Moreover, addressing this issue entails combating sexism, as it is through sexist practices that the groundwork for sexual offences is established. This leads us to discuss a further revelation from our case studies: the conditions which sometimes allow employees to speak up and to reduce sexist and sexual violence in artistic and cultural worlds.

As discussed in the preceding sections, women tend not to speak up, even when victims or witnesses of legally reprehensible sexual offences. However, our case studies also show that this tendency not to denounce gender-based violence may be partly questioned thanks to at least three types of actions.

Lechaux (Chapter 7) as well as Alice Laurent-Camena (Chapter 8) identify how informal groups, through the exchange of experience and information, may help women to label their experience and sometimes even to act upon it. For instance, in her ethnographic work on the French electronic music world, Laurent-Camena shows how passing on rumours between women about some male predators not only gives an increased legitimacy to the denunciation, but sometimes enables those women to protect themselves from such predators by excluding them from their projects. It does not affect the predator’s reputation or ability to perform music, but it does create a safer work environment for those women who decide to act on the shared rumour. So-called intimacy coordinators may also be called for on theatre, opera or cinema stages. ‘By offering a guarantee of preserving emotional safety through learning what we might call “stage consent”’, they help prevent directors from using their position to abuse women (Chapter 7). Public denunciations of sexual abuse, through social media and press releases, are quite effective, as they often lead to the end of the predator’s career or profoundly shake it (as seen in the case of the Helsinki School, Chapter 5). They are however very rare, as observed by Laurent-Camena, not only because they require a large amount of proof and need to be defined as criminal acts to reach such a public level of denunciation, but also because members of the electronic music world prefer to handle denunciations internally and to avoid such public accusations, whenever possible.

In her conclusion, Laurent-Camena considers how ‘“exemplary” public accusations can paradoxically deter victims from speaking out, in addition to the other obstacles they encounter along the denunciation process. The egalitarian ethos, at least concerning the stance against gender-based violence, does not fundamentally disturb the gendered organisation of this art world.’

This book builds toward a comprehensive understanding of gender-based violence in artistic and cultural education and work, exploring its causes as well as its consequences, from silencing the victims to enabling them to speak up—even if in rare cases. However, while it makes significant contributions to this topic, much remains to be examined regarding gender and sexual minorities and men as victims. Despite a strong intention to address gender-based violence affecting gender and sexual minorities—queer, non-binary, transgender and non-heterosexual individuals—as well as men, the authors were unable to do so due to the very limited number of cases encountered during their studies.

Gender-based violence in artistic and cultural worlds does primarily affect women and is mostly implemented by powerful men. However, specific case studies focusing on minoritised victims need to be developed to better understand those phenomena and articulate them with gender-based violence affecting women. We strongly advocate for the development of such case studies in the future, as this book has aimed to expand our understanding of gender-based violence affecting women workers and students in artistic and cultural worlds. For the same reason, while researchers focused on unveiling the ways gender-based violence is produced, legitimised and perpetuated over time, they were unable to implement an intersectional approach (Buscatto et al., 2020)—another development that is called for in future research. And we hope that researchers from all around the world will develop case studies addressing gender-based violence in Latin American, African and Asian countries, since it was beyond the scope of our research to do so.

The book is divided into three parts to provide a comprehensive examination of gender-based violence in artistic and cultural education and work. Part I explores the systemic factors that underpin gender inequalities and gender-based violence, focusing on power dynamics, normalised practices and institutional structures that perpetuate these practices. Part II shifts the focus to the creation of representations of gender-based violence in cultural and artistic works, examining the intersection of creation, representation and the lived experiences of those affected. Part III investigates efforts to challenge and confront gender-based violence within artistic and cultural environments, highlighting the strategies and actions used to address and disrupt these harmful practices.

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