From Red Dresses to Memory Stones: Multimedia Activism and Gender-Based Violence in Canada

An examination of anti-violence media activism in Canada that challenges how we engage with trauma, public memory, and justice.

Sexual assault, intimate partner violence, femicide, and violence against 2SLGBTQIA+ people: gender-based violence, or GBV, has many forms and many victims. The #MeToo movement highlighted the power of speaking up on a global scale; From Red Dresses to Memory Stones offers a timely and necessary investigation of GBV activism in Canada.

Nicolette Little interviews numerous activists and explores five anti-violence media projects in detail: the REDress Project and Disposable Red Woman installations, which draw attention to Canada's crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls; the digital memorialization of murdered Ontario women on each anniversary of the "Montreal Massacre"; the documentary Slut or Nut, filmed during the lead-up to a rape trial; and the Memory Stones Project, in which beach stones are painted with anti-violence messages, then posted across social media. Little challenges assumptions about GBV and provides insights into citizens' creative, daring, collaborative, and memorializing ways of addressing it--and the discourses that normalize rape culture.

Ultimately, this engaging work is about hope, demonstrating that anti-violence activism is a matter of will and can be done in ways that prioritize consent and protect activists' well-being.