The woman with the mattress: the radical, rage-fuelled history of anti-rape art

A performance piece from 2014 has gone viral in response to an allegation of rape at Cornell University. But with such defiant pieces stretching back hundreds of years, will things ever change? In September 2014, Emma Sulkowicz began to carry a blue mattress weighing 23kg around her university campus.

The mattress was similar to the ones New York’s Columbia University used in its dorm rooms, where Sulkowicz said she had been raped by a fellow student two years earlier. Her performance/endurance artwork constituted her visual art senior thesis, drawing attention to the lack of criminal charges brought against her alleged attacker and his continued presence at the university. As she hauled it across campus, others could choose to assist her with her burden. Many did. She recorded responses to the piece in a diary. “I could have taken my pillow,” she told the writer Jessica Valenti at the time. “But I want people to see how it…