editorial director ’ s note
By Grace Aneiza Ali
Gun Violence is a Women ’ s Issue .
Yet , to read the statistics about gun violence in America is to read about a gun culture dominated by men . For women , however , the stakes are just as high — even deadlier . Now , more than ever in our country , gun violence against women and girls has reached new heights . It is undeniably a health crisis . Here ’ s what the
data tells us :
• Women who are victims of domestic violence are 5 times more likely to be killed if their partner owns a gun .
• 80 % of people shot to death by intimate partners in the United States each year are women .
• Every 16 hours , an American woman is fatally shot by a current or former intimate partner .
• 44 % of mass shootings between 2008 and 2013 in the United States involved the targeting of intimate partners .
• Women are 16 times more likely to die by guns in the U . S . than in any other developed country .
Yet , because a culture of silence pervades gender-based violence , we know that these figures are likely a gross underestimation . As troubling as they are , they have not been enough to shift the dangerous normalization of guns in our culture , even when the statistics prove we have a much higher chance of being hurt by guns than being helped by them .
The 10 multidisciplinary women artists in the OF NOTE ’ s The Gun Issue engage the gun as an art object in their artistic practices . In doing so , they confront the infiltration of guns in our day-to-day lives — the gratuitous violence meted out by femme fatales in television , film and gaming , the marketing of real pink guns to girls , the faulty narratives equating gun possession with women ’ s empowerment , and the eroticization and sexualization of the gun-wielding modern woman as the epitome of desire and seduction . who survived violent relationships . They are neighbors living in communities ridden with gang violence . They are educators teaching in a time when our nation ’ s schools and college campuses are hunting grounds plagued by mass shootings . They are citizens living in states where the Second Amendment is the law of the land . And , in cities where the fatigue of police-sanctioned violence on people of color has become all too unbearable .
Some of the women know intimately the pain a gun inflicts , its visible and invisible trauma , and have borne witness to how gun violence rips families apart . Some have been on the receiving end of gun violence by their own intimate partners . Not all of them have reported these experiences , turning instead to their artwork and a community of women , not the police . Others have experienced the fear of having looked down the barrel of a gun in random acts of violence . Some are responsible gun owners . Then there are those who ’ ve never touched a gun , but whose stories of the befallen haunt them .
Collectively , these artists are reclaiming the gun from a weapon of destruction into a tool of resistance . To do so they engage the art of poetry , theater , photography , sculpture , performance , and painting , among other mediums . Their artwork strips the gun bare of its power , repurposes it , and in some cases their artmaking involves its literal dismantling and destruction . Their work forces us to confront the unpretty — the damage done to a woman ’ s body after a gunshot wound . It also generously offers women platforms to share their narratives of survival . In the process , these women are shifting the conversations around gun violence .
At times their work is boldly political , at times they are meant to change hearts and minds . Equally beautiful , these artists use their work to shine a light on one courageous woman / survivor / resistor / disruptor after another — reminding us to trust in the power of women .
These women artists-activists are mothers invested in the safety of their children . They are wives and girlfriends
4 OF NOTE