An examination of anti-violence media activism in Canada that challenges how we engage with trauma, public memory, and justice.
Sexual assault, intimate partner violence, femicide, and violence against 2SLGBTQIA+ people: gender-based violence, or GBV, has many forms and many victims. The #MeToo movement highlighted the power of speaking up on a global scale; From Red Dresses to Memory Stones offers a timely and necessary investigation of GBV activism in Canada.
Nicolette Little interviews numerous activists and explores five anti-violence media projects in detail: the REDress Project and Disposable Red Woman installations, which draw attention to Canada’s crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls; the digital memorialization of murdered Ontario women on each anniversary of the “Montreal Massacre”; the documentary Slut or Nut, filmed during the lead-up to a rape trial; and the Memory Stones Project, in which beach stones are painted with anti-violence messages, then posted across social media. Little challenges assumptions about GBV and provides insights into citizens’ creative, daring, collaborative, and memorializing ways of addressing it—and the discourses that normalize rape culture.
Ultimately, this engaging work is about hope, demonstrating that anti-violence activism is a matter of will and can be done in ways that prioritize consent and protect activists’ well-being.