Earlier feminist scholarship has shown how institutions of art, literature, and education reproduce patriarchal power, from Adrienne Rich’s critique of academic structures to Carol Duncan’s analysis of museums and Linda Nochlin’s work on the exclusion of women artists. More recent work by Sara Ahmed on complaint and complicity in the university and Amia Srinivasan’s critique of sex and pedagogy frame our understanding of professor–student relationships. Building on this foundation, our session extends existing scholarship by engaging with both artistic production and recognition as sites where gendered power is negotiated. While the first two papers show how creative works enact feminist critique, the third reveals how frameworks of literary prestige can obscure complicity even as they reward representations of harm in cultural production.
Since April 2025, the urgency of our topic has only intensified. In Spain, fourteen former students accused a Barcelona professor of sexual coercion and harassment. In the last few months in North America, the dismantling of DEI initiatives and the cancellation of grants in the humanities and social sciences has exposed the fragility of institutional commitments to gender and racial justice. Meanwhile, across global artistic circles, actors, directors, and authors continue to face allegations of misconduct, but are often shielded by cultural capital rather than held accountable. Continued male dominance in gatekeeping roles in these institutions reinforces the hierarchies that enable abuses of power. These realities underscore the need to reimagine the dynamics in art and education that simultaneously elevate and silence. By bringing together analyses of patriarchal museum practices, coercive professor–student relationships, and literary reputation’s complicity in abuse, this panel demonstrates how cultural production can reveal, resist, and perpetuate the structures that legitimate harm.
Jennifer Nagtegaal will begin with an analysis of Tu corazón me pertenece (2021), an expanded comic installation by Sergio García and Lola Moral. Reworking Botticelli’s Scenes from the Story of Nastagio degli Onesti, a canonical narrative long used to uphold patriarchal authority, Nagtegaal argues that the artists foreground female perspectives and critique male-centered violence. García’s digitally drawn panels interrogate the symbolic power of museums, while Moral’s thorned ceramic hearts transform narratives of subjugation into acts of feminist reclamation.
Building on this attention to institutional complicity, Ciara Raczyk examines Paula Bonet’s La anguila (2021), an autobiographical novel that dramatizes a harmful, yet legally consensual professor–student relationship as well as the assault by a celebrated poet. Raczyk demonstrates how Bonet challenges the globalization of consent discourse and the way institutions of higher education and the literary field protect male authority figures at the expense of women’s education and autonomy. Through her use of fiction, Bonet reclaims narrative and epistemic authority, reimagining sexual ethics in the context of structural injustice.
Maya Nitis closes with an interrogation of Alice Munro’s Nobel Prize-recognized reputation alongside her daughter’s testimony of sexual abuse. They reframe Munro’s success as entangled with patriarchal sacrifice and denial, an accomplice to harm even as it is thematized in her fiction. Nitis argues that the concept of bad faith and theory of double consciousness illuminate 21st-century gendered and racialized power dynamics. By placing the contradictions of Munro’s legacy in dialogue with Toni Morrison’s insistence that language carries responsibility, this paper reveals how structures of literary recognition participate in the silencing and hierarchies exposed in the other case studies.
The panel will consist of three 17-minute papers, leaving a minimum of 15 minutes for discussion. As presider, Ciara Raczyk will introduce the speakers, keep time and enforce limits, moderate the session, and ensure the required discussion period.
The session is composed of diverse voices: a PhD student of Spanish, an early-career researcher of Hispanic Studies and comics, and a transdisciplinary senior scholar. Their institutional affiliations include both U.S. and Canadian universities, and their papers engage Canadian, U.S., and Spanish cultural contexts. The panel also reflects a commitment to equity by foregrounding women authors and artists while integrating feminist, queer, and race-critical perspectives.