Returning to The Scene of the Crime: Gendered and Racialized Violence in Ana Mendieta’s Rape Scene

Abstract

Ana Mendieta’s Rape Scene (1973) offers a visceral exploration of sexual, gendered, and racialized violence. Mendieta’s re-enactment of the rape of Sarah Ann Ottens, creates a purposefully traumatic, “triggering” scene for her audience to discover. In “returning to the scene of the crime,” Mendieta produces a critical methodology that facilitates a more complex interaction with the traumatic aftermath of gendered and racialized violence, one that refuses and questions the paltry validation and legitimization of gendered and racialized violence by the law and legal systems. In this article, I argue that Mendieta’s reenactment produces a legal excess, intervening in the juridical distribution of the norm, where the performance disavows the normative, regulative impulses associated with ‘law and order’ by allowing other, alternative traumatic affects into the room, ones which escape how crime scenes, and the law more broadly, try to regulate the emotional and affective aftermath of gendered and racialized violence. Through the performance’s triggering affective surplus, Mendieta draws us towards the site of her own racialized flesh, which, I argue, stages a conversation about the law as a system that both produces and naturalizes the violence that inheres in the gendering and racialization of the body.