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

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 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.