UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Isha Yadav of Gurgaon, India, the first recipient of the Linda Stein Upstander Award administered by Penn State University Libraries, will be honored and present a livestreamed lecture about her research project, “Museum of Rape Threats and Sexism,” at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 2, via Zoom. The Linda Stein Upstander Award honoring Joyce and Diane Froot annually supports social justice activists from around the world whose artistic or scholarly work promotes upstander activities.
Yadav, a doctoral candidate at Ambedkar University and assistant professor at Delhi University, will present a talk, “Memorializing Online Sexual Violence: An Autoethnographic Account of Museum of Rape Threats and Sexism.” Yadav’s museum project raises awareness of cyberstalking and online violence of rape threats and contributes to a growing movement against sexual harassment. The project also involves a crowd-sourced process of public participation and archival research with the Linda Stein Art Education Collection in the University Libraries’ Eberly Family Special Collections.
In describing her project, Yadav wrote, “‘Museum of Rape Threats and Sexism’ is a text-based visual art installation created with over 70 crowdsourced screenshots of online violence, threats, misogyny and sexism. This is my attempt to memorialize the verbal violence that women go through every day. I hope to create a space of intervention into ideas of consent, coercion, harassment, misogyny, sexual assaults, and violence against women. I aim to visualize the affect of violence, explore connection and solidarities between all women. It expands our understanding of victimhood, sexual violence, and urges us to seek constitutional justice for the same. This project aims to show the structural violence and the rape culture. The digital installation seeks to create an intervention into the rape culture, and not only display the threats but also records responses of women who’ve internalized this as the new normal. It expands our understanding of victimhood, sexual violence, and urges us to seek constitutional justice for the same. Memorialization and remembrance and our phone galleries are the spaces of contestation of our radically gendered histories, ideologies, subjectivities and imaginaries.”
The Linda Stein Upstander Award ceremony and lecture is free and open to the public, and available to watch via Zoom; however, registration is required. A Zoom link will be sent via email to registrants on the day of the event.
Interested applicants for the Linda Stein Upstander Award honoring Joyce and Diane Froot may visit the online application site for more information.