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  • Tanya Serisier: Speaking Out: Feminism, Rape and Narrative Politics (Book review)

    Author(s)
    Crawley, Karen
    Griffith University Author(s)
    Crawley, Karen
    Year published
    2021
    Metadata
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    Abstract
    Personal narratives of sexual violence are now ubiquitous in Western, anglophone popular culture, and form a central pillar of feminist anti-rape politics. As a key legacy of second-wave feminism, the act of testifying to having experienced sexual violence—of ‘speaking out’—is understood not only to transform the speaker from victim to survivor, but to be a necessary condition for any collective political action aimed at combatting sexual violence. The powerful effects of such personal narratives, however, are not evenly distributed, and not without unintended consequences, both for those people whose stories are continually ...
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    Personal narratives of sexual violence are now ubiquitous in Western, anglophone popular culture, and form a central pillar of feminist anti-rape politics. As a key legacy of second-wave feminism, the act of testifying to having experienced sexual violence—of ‘speaking out’—is understood not only to transform the speaker from victim to survivor, but to be a necessary condition for any collective political action aimed at combatting sexual violence. The powerful effects of such personal narratives, however, are not evenly distributed, and not without unintended consequences, both for those people whose stories are continually demanded, and for those whose stories remain unheard. In her masterfully written account, Speaking Out: Sexual Violence and Narrative Politics (2018), political and cultural theorist Tanya Serisier gives us the analytical tools to understand and negotiate the contested and ethically fraught terrain of what she dubs the “narrative politics” (16) in which stories of sexual violence are received and put to work. Released three years ago, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, Serisier’s book situates that cultural watershed in a much longer history of feminist anti-rape politics, from the feminist consciousness-raising practices of the 1970s through to contemporary social media and internet-based practices of speaking out. Serisier brings the interdisciplinary resources of cultural and literary theory to bear on the social practice of speaking out, in order to identify it as a ‘genre’ which has both constraining and enabling effects. Her nuanced account of the gendered and racialised dynamics of genre, judgement and belief that shape and mobilise such stories has quickly become a classic, a must-read for anyone grappling with the ‘groundhog day’ of sexual violence, in which no amount of speaking out ever seems to produce substantial changes.
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    Journal Title
    Feminist Legal Studies
    DOI
    https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-021-09461-7
    Note
    This publication has been entered in Griffith Research Online as an advanced online version.
    Subject
    Criminology
    Social Sciences
    Women's Studies
    Government & Law
    Publication URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/10072/405022
    Collection
    • Journal articles

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