Introduction

Abstract

The introduction lays out the framework for why we doubt what women say about their lives; defines the figure of the tainted witness as who a woman can become, not who she is; places the figure of the woman witness and the practices of testimony (legal and literary) in the context of raced and gendered histories of doubt; theorizes the presence of a testimonial network through which bodies, persons, and words moves as a circulatory system in which histories of slavery and colonialism are lodged and which incubates sexism and racism; analyzes how these pre-existing judgments lay in wait for any particular woman’s testimony in order to smear her; defines scandal as the substitution of the witness’s terms for hostile ones that are then repeated as if truth and are recycled through global media; and defines the “adequate witness” as one who provides a “holding environment” (following Winnicott) for testimony.