Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their by Leigh Gilmore

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their by Leigh Gilmore Sarah Brophy (bio) Leigh Gilmore. Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives Columbia UP 2017, 240 pp. ISBN 978-0231177146, $30 hard-cover; $22 paperback. As the #MeToo hashtag began to go viral in October 2017, prompting an overdue reckoning with endemic sexual harassment and assault, memoirist Dorothy Allison's epigram resurfaced in my thoughts: "Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I' d rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me" (71, emphasis in original). In its bold refusal to accept the weight of the world's judgment, Allison's telling of family sexual violence and class shame crystallizes the necessity—but also the riskiness—of survivors going public with their stories. While leaders of the #MeToo movement, including Black feminist organizer Tarana Burke, who coined the phrase for use by survivors in 2006, have been acknowledged by Time as "Person of the Year" for 2017, and while some cases of longstanding injustice are being addressed in the courts and within institutions, the deck remains stacked against testimony by women and people of color. Even as some of the most predatory figures, including Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and Larry Nassar, are beginning to be held to account, countless others, including men in the highest offices of the land, continue to "float" in what Leigh Gilmore in her 2017 book Tainted Witness aptly calls "bubbles of impunity" (31), and the speech of those testifying against them struggles to find purchase. What is the nature of this impasse, and how might we imagine breaking through it? As Gilmore makes clear, "testimonial truth is indexed not to facts but to power," and "when witnesses testify they elicit different standards of judgment" (14). The "blank" in our knowledge that Gilmore fills in is "that norms of justice and personhood do not fully include women, and their agency, value, and even existence are often denied through this exclusion" (25). As a result, sympathy, credibility, and indeed objectivity remain stubbornly lodged as the perquisites of the powerful and the institutions that support them (14–15). In Gilmore's prescient and incisive study, we have at hand vital resources for historicizing the present sea change as well as for grappling with our roles as scholars, teachers, artists, and activists in working toward a more just future. This conceptually and analytically rich book carries forward the ground-breaking insights of Gilmore's earlier work on women's life writing. Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women's Self-Representation, published in 1994, put pressure on how we understand autobiographical identity, repositioning it as multitextual, discontinuous, and embedded in stories and their interpretation and linking "resistance" in women's life writing to "eruptions and interruptions" that challenge normative notions of self-coherence (42). The [End Page 691] Limits of Autobiography, published in 2001, went on to develop the idea of literary witness as an "alternative jurisdiction," highlighting "the productivity of the limit" in the work of queer and diasporic writers, such as Allison and Jamaica Kincaid, who resist the centrality of the confessional in Western autobiography, and who find "other ways to bear this burden" of intimate truth-telling (14–16). Tainted Witness continues and deepens Gilmore's feminist intervention into how women's auto/biographical production is understood by attending to the discrediting and ultimately the violence meted out at the juncture of public and private spheres, where women's testimonies struggle to be articulated and to find an "adequate witness" (5). Theoretical emphases in Tainted Witness appropriate to its focus on "testimonial networks" (3) include the workings of the "intimate public sphere" (from Lauren Berlant), "affective economies" (from Sara Ahmed), and the idea of "testimonial transactions," as survivor speech moves transnationally through multiply mediated public spheres (from Gillian Whitlock). In Gilmore's pithy formulation, "Testimony moves, but judgment sticks" (5). A key insight here is that those sticky judgments are hard to get rid of once your speech and embodiment are targeted for tainting. Scandal "takes parasitic life from the body of testimony, and old, illegitimate stories have...