Your body is a battleground: Art therapy with women

•Explores a wide-range of complex issues affecting women today.•Suggests that socio-economic awareness is vital for our thinking about women's mental wellbeing.•Explores the visual culture which surrounds us, and the particular implications for women.•Presents a lively polemical case for the importance of thinking about women's issues in art therapy.•Draws on social anthropology to critique psychological reductionism.

This article interrogates the place of feminism within art therapy. It provides a lively, polemical argument that art therapy must maintain a critical relationship to the discipline of psychology in order to avoid oppressing women with misogynistic discourses which are embedded in theories and practices. The article also explores the visual culture which surrounds us, and how images affect our sensibility, our self-esteem, and our ability to act in the world.