An overview of representations in church decoration, legal texts, romances, chronicles, and political allegories – notwithstanding the differences of these contexts – can help us to recognize additional patterns. On one end of the spectrum, we find the question of religious imagery. In Last Judgement scenes naked female (and male) figures are represented in large numbers. Physical aggression against the human body is explicit and, in this respect, women suffer violence comparable to sodomites. The use of force is endorsed. Although the imagery is intended to denounce lustful acts, the paintings themselves effectively promote sex crimes. This subversive scenario can lead to the sanitization of the violent encounter between women and their tormentors (missing in the case of sodomites). The two political allegories in Padua and Siena mark the other end of the spectrum. I would like to believe that Giotto di Bondone’s Injustice comes closest to a universal denunciation of rape. Here the display of the naked female victim reinforces the explicit rendering of sexual aggression. The scene is carefully contextualized, which discards sanitizing readings. The radicalism of this fresco is striking even compared to Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s War, where, instead of nudity, an equally general denunciation relies on the indicators of bridal status and abduction. Because of its reference to marriage, Lorenzetti’s work is closer to patriarchal structures than Giotto’s. Nevertheless, these two allegories constitute the pinnacle of visualizing civic political thought in the epoch and sketch the utopia of a rape-free society.

This chapter considers the forms and functions of feminist writings from life in the twenty-first century, illuminating a perceived shift in the conception of the personal-as-political. Part one addresses recent feminist memoirs which seek to memorialise a period and a collective experience, thereby doing history as autobiography (Andrea Dworkin’s Heartbreak (2002) and Lynne Segal’s Making Trouble: Life and Politics (2007)); it asks how and to what ends past feminisms are narrated and remembered in the present. Part two turns to the emergence of generically inventive and autofictional forms of life writing by women in recent years. Mixing essay, fiction, theory, and autobiography, texts such as Kate Zambreno’s Heroines (2012) and Chris Kraus’s Aliens and Anorexia (2000) displace the writing ‘I’ via the incorporation and assimilation of various other life stories. I assess the possibilities and limitations of this embrace of empathetic intersubjectivity as an ethical strategy of recent feminist life writing, considering how this reframesin perhaps problematically privatised waysearlier notions of solidarity and collectivity.