Journal of Gender Studies

Where Is a Woman’s Image Safe? Defacement, Erasure and Fabrication in Public and Digital Spaces

In January 2026, murals of faceless female silhouettes in yoga poses were scratched around the genital area in the Indian city of Gwalior. The figures depicted no identifiable women; they were attacked anyway. In 2024, sexually explicit AI-generated deepfakes of Taylor Swift circulated widely online, demonstrating a very different but related form of image violation. Across a scratched public wall and a fabricated digital image, the same question emerges: what happens when an image of a woman becomes the surface upon which sexualisation, humiliation or punishment is performed? This special issue asks where, if anywhere, a woman's image can be assumed to be safe.

This issue examines violations of women’s images across public and digital spaces: the scratched mural, the tarred hoarding, the blacked-out photograph, the defaced campaign image, the whitewashed shopfront, and the image digitally fabricated, sexualised, altered, obscured or erased. The issue is grounded in established scholarship on image-based sexual abuse, sexual privacy, technology-facilitated sexual violence and deepfake or digitally altered imagery, while extending those debates to public, political, religious, commercial and artistic representations of women. It asks when an intervention upon an image functions as sexualisation, misogynistic punishment, humiliation, coercion or exclusion, and how the image can operate as a surrogate site of harm.

The issue is deliberately focused on women's images. Its concern is not with every form of image alteration, but with the ways representations of women can become sites of sexualisation, misogynistic punishment, moral policing, coercion, exclusion or erasure. Because these practices are shaped by different cultural, political and media contexts, we particularly encourage submissions built around case studies from different regions of the world. We welcome work on South Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and Central Asia, East and Southeast Asia, Europe and North America, as well as comparative and transregional studies. Abstracts should indicate the principal country or regional context examined.

We welcome contributions on topics including, but not limited to:

•    Theorising violations of women’s images: their relationship to image-based sexual abuse, sexual privacy, deepfakes, visual alteration and erasure

•    Iconoclasm, graffiti and defacement of women’s images: punitive alteration, feminist counter-iconoclasm, satire, punk and détournement

•    The image as surrogate body: effigy, substitution and symbolic violence

•    Murals, street art and public art depicting women and their destruction

•    Film hoardings, billboards and advertising: tarring, blacking-out and moral policing

•    Political posters, memorials and the defacement of women’s campaign and commemorative imagery

•    Deepfakes, nudify applications, digitally altered imagery and synthetic non-consensual sexual images

•    Image-based sexual abuse, sexual image violations and the extension beyond the intimate-image frame

•    Platform moderation, shadowbanning and the algorithmic erasure of women’s bodies

•    The erasure of women from photographs: religious, state and press censorship

•    Religious and devotional images of women, and their violation

•    Caste, class, colourism, religion and sexuality in the selection of which images are attacked

•    Feminist iconoclasm: when women deface images of women

•    What is the injury when an image, rather than a person, is the victim?

•    Artistic and activist responses: repair, repainting, refusal and the counter-image