As a result, the invited audience was essentially being asked to play the role of the person who is shocked by such a discovery -- and insofar as they knew they were being invited by Mendieta, and probably had basic knowledge of the crime that occurred, they were also being invited to imagine that the victim of such a crime might well have been Mendieta or any other female student on campus. This is interesting insofar as it relates to an observation made by Kwon about Mendieta's early work from this period: Kwon notes that "Mendieta's use of her/the body almost always approached erasure or negation: her 'body' consistently disappeared. This is striking given that most feminist artists during the 1970s vied for visibility and self-affirming expression through figurative, literal, sometimes 'in-your-face' presence. It is curious that Mendieta traced her absence instead."[footnoteRef:5] In "Rape Scene" this is paradoxically true: the...
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