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

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 weighs down a person to be ignored by the school administration and harassed by police.” Sulkowicz would carry the mattress , she said, for as long as her alleged attacker remained at Columbia. And so she ended up carrying it all the way to graduation where, helped by other women, she took it on stage. The university president refused to shake her hand, turning away from her instead.

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