Rethinking Ventriloquism: Untellability, Chaotic Narratives, Social Justice, and the Choice to Speak For, About, and Without

Abstract

Over the years, our strategies of representation have been criticized for focusing on the integration of marginal voices by sometimes choosing to speak on behalf of underrepresented communities. Using examples from rape, domestic violence, and HIV ‘deliberate’ infection, this paper will explore issues that arise when considering representational ideology in the context of incoherent or chaotic narratives of traumatized and stigmatized research participants. Representational politics in folklore have continually emphasized the inclusion of multiple voices in our published texts, as well as the need to find more and better mechanisms to let underrepresented voices be heard. Over the years our strategies of representation have been criticized, however, for focusing on the integration of marginal voices by sometimes choosing to speak on behalf of underrepresented communities, rather than letting them speak for themselves. In an excellent critique of representational politics in folklore—one modeled on Spivak’s (1988) “Can the Subaltern Speak?”—Susan Ritchie writes about the folklorist as “ventriloquist,” or one who presumes “to speak on behalf of some voiceless group or individual” (1993, 366). Ventriloquism, she writes, establishes “the folklorist as a kind of medium or channeler, who presents the true voices of those otherwise lost to an audience so eager for diverse articulations that they fail to note [that] this ‘diversity’. . . issues from a single disciplinary throat” (367). Ritchie cautions us about imagined