Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives
Tainted Witness examines how gender, race, and doubt stick to women witnesses as their testimony circulates in search of an adequate witness. Bringing together feminist, literary, and legal frameworks, Leigh Gilmore provides provocative readings of what happens when women's testi... read full description below.
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Full details for this title
| Interest Age |
19+ years |
| Reading Age |
19+ years |
| Library of Congress |
Feminist theory, Sex discrimination against women - Law and legislation, False testimony, Sex discrimination in criminal justice administration, Crime - Sex differences |
| NBS Text |
Gender Studies / Gay & Lesbian Studies |
| ONIX Text |
Professional and scholarly;College/higher education |
|
| Dewey Code |
347.066082 |
| Catalogue Code |
965119 |
Description of this Book
In 1991, Anita Hill brought testimony and scandal into America's living rooms during televised Senate confirmation hearings in which she detailed the sexual harassment she had suffered at the hands of Clarence Thomas. The male Senate Judiciary Committee refused to take Hill seriously, and the veracity of Hill's claims were sullied in the mainstream media. Hill was defamed as a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty, and Thomas was confirmed. The tainting of Hill and her testimony are part of a larger social history in which women find themselves caught up in a system that refuses to believe what they say. The Anita Hill case shows how a tainted witness is not who someone is, but what someone can become. Tainted Witness elucidates how persistent and pernicious patterns of doubt attach to women who bring forward accounts of sexual and racial violence. Reactions to Anita Hill's testimony as well as Rigoberta Mench 's account of genocide in Guatemala, contemporary memoirs that chronicle experiences of gendered and racialized violence, and news stories like Nafissatou Diallo's claim that Dominique Strauss-Kahn raped her, demonstrate the reflexive processes of judgment that discredit women's complex accounts of harm, both in legal courts and courts of public opinion. The accelerated tempo of scandal is crucial to tainting women witnesses. The rush to judgment encourages framing testimonial conflicts in terms of who is telling the truth and who is lying, with the presumption that this is an adequate and meaningful testimonial test. Such a framing, however, prevents witnesses from providing adequate context for their testimony and especially elides histories of slavery and colonialism. Leigh Gilmore examines what happens when women's testimony is discredited, but also traces the circulation of testimony beyond the frame of scandal and its capacity to bear witness anew.
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Awards, Reviews & Star Ratings
| Awards |
Winner of Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2018
|
| NZ Review |
Tainted Witness is an important, relevant, often brilliant book. It further establishes Leigh Gilmore as one of the best critics writing today on the intersection of feminism and life narrative. -- Hillary Chute, author of Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics Tainted Witness displays, once more, Leigh Gilmore's remarkable ability to hone in on the most interesting, provocative, or instructive moments in any historical situation or text, and then say memorable and highly useful things about them. -- Craig Howes, University of Hawai'i at Manoa |
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Author's Bio
Leigh Gilmore, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Wellesley College, is the author of The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (2001) and Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women's Self-Representation (1994) and coeditor of Autobiography and Postmodernism (1994). She has published articles in Feminist Studies, Signs, Women's Studies Quarterly, and Biography, among others, and in numerous collections. She was Dorothy Cruickshank Backstrand Chair of Gender and Women's Studies at Scripps College, professor of English at the Ohio State University, and has held visiting appointments at Brown University, Harvard Divinity School, Northeastern University, the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of California, Berkeley.
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