Research Catalog
Tainted witness : why we doubt what women say about their lives
- Title
- Tainted witness : why we doubt what women say about their lives / Leigh Gilmore.
- Author
- Gilmore, Leigh, 1959-
- Publication
- New York : Columbia University Press, [2017]
- Supplementary Content
- Additional Information at Google Books
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| Status | Format | Access | Call Number | Item Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Available - Can be used on site. Please visit New York Public Library - Schwarzman Building to submit a request in person. | Book/Text | Use in library | JFE 18-2125 | Schwarzman Building - Main Reading Room 315 |
Details
- Description
- xi, 218 pages; 24 cm
- Summary
- "In 1991, Anita Hill's testimony during Clarence Thomas's Senate confirmation hearing brought the problem of sexual harassment to a public audience. Although widely believed by women, Hill was defamed by conservatives and Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court. The tainting of Hill and her testimony is part of a larger social history in which women find themselves caught up in a system that refuses to believe what they say. Hill's experience shows how a tainted witness is not who someone is, but what someone can become. Tainted Witness examines how gender, race, and doubt stick to women witnesses as their testimony circulates in search of an adequate witness. Judgment falls unequally upon women who bear witness, as well-known conflicts about testimonial authority in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries reveal. Women's testimonial accounts demonstrate both the symbolic potency of women's bodies and speech in the public sphere and the relative lack of institutional security and control to which they can lay claim. Each testimonial act follows in the wake of a long and invidious association of race and gender with lying that can be found to this day within legal courts and everyday practices of judgment, defining these locations as willfully unknowing and hostile to complex accounts of harm. Bringing together feminist, literary, and legal frameworks, Leigh Gilmore provides provocative readings of what happens when women's testimony is discredited. She demonstrates how testimony crosses jurisdictions, publics, and the unsteady line between truth and fiction in search of justice."--Jacket.
- Series Statement
- Gender and culture
- Uniform Title
- Gender and culture.
- Subjects
- Bibliography (note)
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 197-207) and index.
- Contents
- Introduction : tainted witness in testimonial networks -- Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the search for an adequate witness -- Jurisdictions and testimonial networks : Rigoberta Menchú -- Neoliberal life narrative : from testimony to self-help -- Witness by proxy : girls in humanitarian storytelling -- Tainted witness in law and literature : Nafissatou Diallo and Jamaica Kincaid -- Conclusion : testimonial publics--#BlackLivesMatter and Claudia Rankine's Citizen.
- Call Number
- JFE 18-2125
- ISBN
- 9780231177146
- 0231177143
- LCCN
- 2016033453
- OCLC
- 950448502
- Author
- Gilmore, Leigh, 1959- author.
- Title
- Tainted witness : why we doubt what women say about their lives / Leigh Gilmore.
- Publisher
- New York : Columbia University Press, [2017]
- Type of Content
- text
- Type of Medium
- unmediated
- Type of Carrier
- volume
- Series
- Gender and cultureGender and culture.
- Bibliography
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 197-207) and index.
- Connect to:
- Research Call Number
- JFE 18-2125