Description
Book SynopsisTainted Witness examines how gender, race, and doubt stick to women witnesses as their testimony circulates in search of an adequate witness.
Trade ReviewIn this moving and transformative text, Leigh Gilmore explores the different ways that women's testimonies are made incredible. With patience and care, Gilmore explores how testimonies circulate, how they keep open histories that have yet to be resolved, and how testimonies become tainted because of who as well as what they point to. This insightful book gives testimony a feminist hearing -- Sara Ahmed, author of
Living a Feminist Life and Willful SubjectsTainted 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
Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form and
Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary ComicsTainted 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, director of the Center for Biographical Research and professor of English, University of Hawai'i at Manoa
Rarely does an academic book address its moment so precisely as
Tainted Witness.... An important and timely book. If ever we needed evidence that the work of feminism is not yet done, this is it. * Times Higher Education *
Tainted Witness doesn't just look at what's broken about how we view women's testimony. It also examines how women can work toward "distributing doubt" and ultimately arrive at true justice, making this essential reading for women living under a president who publicly professed sexual assault and faced no consequences. * Rumpus *
Tainted Witness is a timely and necessary defense of the women whose voices are so often drowned out or shouted down. * Washington Post *
A highly original and precise account of contemporary cultural politics surrounding women's testimony that offers new perspectives on a set of important case studies and significant cultural moments. * Social and Legal Studies *
A very provocative and well-grounded work that deserves considerable attention. * Choice *
An important work. * Resources for Gender and Women Studies *
The book’s import for the current and future field of auto/biography studies cannot be overestimated. Gilmore puts her finger on several of the most important, deeply intertwined questions about justice and about genre/form/mediation that we now face as interdisciplinary scholars of life writing and media. * Biography *
Table of ContentsPreface to the Paperback Edition
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Tainted Witness in Testimonial Networks
1. Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Search for an Adequate Witness
2. Jurisdictions and Testimonial Networks: Rigoberta Menchú
3. Neoliberal Life Narrative: From Testimony to Self-Help
4. Witness by Proxy: Girls in Humanitarian Storytelling
5. Tainted Witness in Law and Literature: Nafissatou Diallo and Jamaica Kincaid
Conclusion: Testimonial Publics—#BlackLivesMatter and Claudia Rankine's
CitizenNotes
Bibliography
Index
