Art as a Catalyst: Empowering Cultural Resistance

I had the opportunity to take the Syracuse Writing 105 course during my senior year of

high school and through it, I learned a lot about argumentative writing. For Unit 3 we spent

weeks exploring, analyzing, questioning, critiquing, and arguing about how and why culture is

used to resist or challenge contemporary American society's dominant ideologies, policies, and

practices. In my Unit 3 argumentative essay, I was assigned to identify my own form of cultural

resistance and adopt a position on its effectiveness after research and reflection on the conflict.

This required me to spend some time listening in on and analyzing the arguments that were

taking place in the debate so that I could incorporate the ideas of those sources into my own

writing. Being able to accurately represent the ideas of others and use them in ways that

effectively help develop and support my thinking was a skill crucial to this essay.

For my choice of cultural resistance, I decided to discuss how art is an effective tool for

resistance in the case of Article 522 of the Lebanese Penal Code. The article allowed men

convicted of sexual assault, abduction, or statutory rape to evade a minimum penalty of five

years of hard labor if they provided a valid marriage contract with the victim. AABAD, a UN

ECOSOC-accredited resource Centre for Gender Equality, saw this law as a blatant form of
discrimination against women and a means of escape for rapists to avoid punishment. In

response, they teamed up with Lebanese artist Mireille Honein to create “Undress 522,” an art

installation comprising 31 wedding dresses made of translucent, paper material hung from

nooses. The goal of “Undress 522” was to abolish Article 522 and sensitize the public about the

law. All parts of her installation were strategic, from the dresses themselves to the location. The

number of dresses in the installation was intended to point toward the idea that each day of the

month a woman is raped and forced to marry her rapist; and the paper material symbolized the

fragile nature of these coerced marriages. Furthermore, Honein chose to set up the piece on

Beruit’s crowded seafront to ensure maximum visibility.

Cultural resistance uses culture to bring together marginalized groups to critique power

structures and promote political, economic, and social change. “Undress 522” was both a

political and social statement because it pressured Lebanon’s Parliamentary Committee to

abolish the penal code and reduced the social stigma surrounding rape as a shame to the victim’s

family. The art installation accomplishes both goals because art is a powerful tactic for

cultivating empathy in audiences. Whether through an art installation, song, or poetry,

experiencing something through art can have a much stronger impact than receiving the same
message through purely informational means. Therefore, if the goal of a certain culture or group

is to move someone to act, they need to convey their belief or custom in a way that resonates on

a more visceral level. When sensitizing the public to Lebanese penal code 522, the art

installation not only informed the public about the code but also highlighted how violently it can

affect a woman's life, appealing to the audience’s sense of injustice.

We are talking about sentencing women to life-long rape to salvage a victim’s honor

because there are these cultural norms deeply rooted in society. The best way to address this is

by raising awareness about the law and the suffering it inflicts on women. To read more about

Lebanon’s discriminatory laws, Article 522’s effect on women, and cultural resistance as a

whole, I linked my full essay below.