a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

ISSN: 0898-9575 (Print) 2151-7290 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/raut20

Rev. of Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What

Women Say About Their Lives

To cite this article: (2019) Rev. of Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their
Lives, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 34:2, 364-368, DOI: 10.1080/08989575.2019.1592386

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2019.1592386

Published online: 17 Apr 2019.

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364 BOOK REVIEW

Works Cited
Gerrig, Richard. Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities
of Reading. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Print.
Rak, Julie. Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market. Waterloo, ON:
Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013. Print.

Alison Gibbons
Sheffield Hallam University
a.gibbons@shu.ac.uk
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8912-9350
This article was originally published with errors, which have now been
corrected in the online version. Please see Correction
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2019.1637084)

# 2019 Alison Gibbons

https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2019.1592385

Rev. of Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About

Their Lives LEIGH GILMORE Columba University Press, 2017, 240 pp.,
$30 (Hardcover), ISBN 978-0-2311-7714-6

In Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives,
Leigh Gilmore extends her commanding knowledge of testimony, trauma,
and women’s life narrative in vital new directions that have a broad public as
well as scholarly appeal and applicability. With its perceptive tracking of how
women’s testimony circulates and is received in the public sphere, Tainted
Witness is perfectly timed to provide essential guidance for making sense
both of women’s testimonies of sexual harm and responses to them in an era
of #MeToo. The central premise of the book is that “judgment falls unequally
on women who bear witness” and that women’s testimony is “deformed by
doubt.” In this regard, Tainted Witness can be read productively alongside
Mary Beard’s Women and Power, which traces the discrediting of women’s
speech to Ancient Greece and Rome. Rejecting the conventional association
of women with lying, Gilmore persuasively argues that “a tainted witness is
not who someone is but who someone can become in the process of bringing
an account into the public sphere” (44), particularly when the witness is typ-
ically not in control of the forum of judgment and is unable to provide rele-
vant context.
Gilmore not only identifies how scandal, doubt, victim blaming, and alle-
gations of lying attach to and discredit women’s testimony. Through an ana-
lysis of exemplary cases that unfold over five chapters, she also maps the
aftermath, as testimony travels through testimonial networks in search of
“new venues, jurisdictions, and publics where it may bear witness anew” (2).
Several cases involve claims of sexual harm in which histories of racial and
 a|b: AUTO|BIOGRAPHY STUDIES 365

colonial violence, slavery, and immigration create complex and layered con-
texts, often unacknowledged in forums of judgment, for the shaping and
reception of women’s testimony. Others pursue neoliberal life narrative, as it
is deployed in contexts ranging from self-help to humanitarianism. The book
concludes with a timely turn to contemporary social justice movements, not-
ably Black Lives Matter, which Gilmore advocates as an instance of feminist
intersectional witness. What makes this book ultimately hopeful is her gratify-
ing demonstration that even after women’s testimony is tainted, it may
belatedly bear witness to harms that were previously dismissed or doubted,
and in the process, legitimate women’s witness.
Indicative of the book’s uncanny precision in capturing the feminist zeit-
geist, Gilmore’s analysis begins by returning to Anita Hill’s testimony, pre-
sented during the 1991 Senate Judiciary Hearings for Clarence Thomas’s
nomination to the Supreme Court, in which Hill detailed the sexual harass-
ment Thomas subjected her to. Gilmore contends that Hill’s testimony, deliv-
ered in an era when sexual harassment was not well understood, marked a
“new era” in doubting women’s testimony. In 1991, Gilmore reminds us, Hill
was championed by feminist legal reformers targeting sexual harassment in
the workplace. In a stunning reading of the hearings and their aftermath,
Gilmore trenchantly argues that another history—“the racial past”—also
sought a witness in the hearings (43). Showing how these very different his-
tories, interests, and players worked together to shape the reception of Hill’s
testimony and Thomas’s response, Gilmore contends that “the relationship
between racial violence, segregation, sexual violence, and workplace harass-
ment represented the necessary context for understanding Anita Hill’s and
Clarence Thomas’s intertwined lives” (43). Analyzing the forces, including the
actions of senators, that tainted Hill’s testimony and subjected her to a
“second harassment,” Gilmore demonstrates “how judgments about race, gen-
der, bodies, and the power of life story stick to witnesses who move through
[testimonial networks]” (29) and how “the array of gendered and raced power
became a forum of judgment organized around Hill’s speech, despite the fact
that she was neither on trial nor pressing a legal claim” (45). Additionally,
she charts the “battle of narratives” that broke out in the aftermath, a period
during which both Hill and Thomas published memoirs, showing how recep-
tion split along lines of gender and race.
When she returned to Anita Hill’s testimony as an exemplary starting
point for exploring how women’s testimony is tainted, Gilmore could not
have anticipated the 2018 Senate Judiciary hearings for Supreme Court nom-
inee Brett Kavanaugh, and the way in which Christine Blasey Ford’s testi-
mony that she was sexually assaulted by him as a teenager would, like Hill’s,
grip the nation. In contrast to the suppressed history of slavery and Jim
Crow that haunted the HilljThomas hearings, the Kavanaugh hearings were
shaped by the very different and largely unacknowledged context of white
privilege. Blasey’s Ford’s testimony of gendered harm, like Hill’s, was tainted
by its association with feminism, as sexual assault survivors and supporters,
some dressed in the now iconic red costumes familiar from The Handmaid’s
366 BOOK REVIEW

Tale, crowded the hearings. Notably, the public memory of the HilljThomas
hearings was everywhere on display as the Kavanaugh hearings played out,
shaping the ways in which Blasey Ford was questioned by a female counsel
and treated by senators. Although her testimony, like Hill’s, did not prevent
the nominee from going forward, these hearings created a context in which
Hill’s testimony could bear witness anew, not only to sexual assault but also
to the ways in which women’s testimony is freighted by doubt. The reanima-
tion of Hill’s testimony in the recent hearings confirms Gilmore’s astute
insight that testimony may lay dormant for years—even for a generation—
until some event renders it newly significant, and it searches out new publics.
In “Jurisdictions and Testimonial Networks: Rigaberta Mench u,” Gilmore
takes the timely opportunity afforded by a recent national court decision in
Guatemala to revisit the discrediting of 1992 Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta
Mench u’s testimonio. In the 1980s and 1990s, Mench u’s testimonio, which
detailed the genocide of indigenous Mayans and the United States’ support
for the government, captured a place on the syllabi of American classes. After
anthropologist David Stoll published his account challenging the veracity of
Mench u’s testimonio, it received extensive commentary and critical analysis
by scholars of Latin America culture and politics, feminists, and neoconserva-
tive critics. Returning to her earlier work on Mench u and her productive
concept of jurisdiction as a “forum of judgment” through which life narrative
moves, Gilmore takes the new court decision in Guatemala not only as a val-
idation of Mench u’s account, but as an invitation to explore how her testimo-
nio was judged as it moved through jurisdictions. Carefully distinguishing
between truth and judgment, she argues that the question of “who has the
authority to judge” is often deflected in favor of a notion of truth as con-
formity to a consistent set of facts. A simplistic empirical conception of truth,
she contends, obfuscates the larger, collective truths—the truth of genocide—
that Mench u sought to witness. Such an understanding of truth is danger-
ously limited, especially when testimonio bears witness not in the name of a
singular “I” but for a collective “we,” and when traumatic events such as
genocide are at stake.
In stark contrast to the collective witness of testimonio, Gilmore explores
how a neoliberal imperative, with its prioritizing of the entrepreneurial “I,” is
shaping life narrative and its reception today. In “Neoliberal Life Narrative:
From Testimony to Self-Help,” she distinguishes neoliberal life narratives
such as Jeanette Walls’s The Glass Castle and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Love,
Pray, from testimony, which “is rooted in specific contexts of contemporary
harm for which witnesses seek a hearing and relief” (93). Although such nar-
ratives travel along the same pathways as testimony, and often to the same
audiences, what distinguishes them from testimony, she asserts, is their focus
on individual overcoming, rather than analysis of broader historical, cultural,
and political factors as they shape a life. In “Witness by Proxy: Girls in
Humanitarian Storytelling,” Gilmore tracks the fortunes of Greg Mortenson’s
Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace … One School at a
Time. Mortenson’s text and paratexts position him as a “humanitarian hero”
 a|b: AUTO|BIOGRAPHY STUDIES 367

who promoted “schools not bombs.” Exploring both the ascendancy of his
life narrative and the scandal that tainted it, Gilmore demonstrates that doubt
and stigma attach differently to men—that he was able to continue to operate
in the aftermath of scandal. His success can be credited, in part, to the fact
that his tale of individual overcoming, distant locales, and his unlikely status
as a humanitarian hero conformed to the genre of neoliberal life narrative. In
taking up the position of “proxy witness” to testify on behalf of girls and edu-
cation, Mortensen’s story, Gilmore observes, “simultaneously indicate[s] an
openness to and even a demand for the personal stories of girls and women
and yet attach[es] credibility to a white, Western, and male spokesperson
who amplifies his significance as an intermediary in engaging with them and
understanding their needs” (123). In these chapters, she demonstrates with
formidable perspicuity that although neoliberal life narrative dominates the
memoir boom, it does so at the cost of shrinking “a global crisis to the scale
of manageable, individual response” (127).
In the book’s penultimate chapter, “Tainted Witness in Law and
Literature: Nafissatuou Diallo and Jamaica Kincaid,” Gilmore returns to issues
of race, gender, and colonial violence, meticulously tracking Diallo’s testi-
mony across jurisdictions, and considering the differing possibilities for wom-
en’s testimonies in legal and literary venues. When Diallo, an immigrant
working at a hotel in New York City, accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then
head of the IMF, of rape, her testimony moved through the criminal court,
the court of public opinion and civil court. Gilmore shows how the outcome
was shaped by rules of evidence that operate within a given jurisdiction
(135). Rather than fault Diallo’s testimony for narrative inconsistency, she
details the different jurisdictions and the differing standards of evidence,
audiences, purposes, and ends that governed each of these jurisdictions. She
lucidly argues that, in cases such as Diallo’s, to tie “truth to narrative instead
of the authorities” (141) and to rules of evidence that operate within a juris-
diction is to misunderstand the rhetorical demands of testimony and reduce
complexity. Reading Jamaica Kincaid’s multiple autobiographies—which also
bear witness to complex and layered histories of harm—alongside Diallo’s tes-
timony, Gilmore fruitfully positions literary witness as an alternative jurisdic-
tion. In contrast to the expectations for consistency placed on witnesses in
court, literary witness offers an “imaginative jurisdiction in which elements of
doubt, sympathy, judgement, agency, harm, and vulnerability are untethered
from the demands of courts and may … reorient what we think we know
about ‘what really happened’” (135). In concluding, Gilmore turns to the
Black Lives Matter movement, founded by three feminist activists of color,
which “has seeded the testimonial network with a feminist intersectional ana-
lysis” (168). While her focus is primarily on race and gender rather than
queer sexuality, Tainted Witness lays the groundwork for future that might
consider how queer and trans testimony is tainted, and how sexuality, race,
gender, and scandal travel together to distort complex narratives of sexuality.
Tainted Witness is a signature addition to a body of outstanding books
and articles on life narrative and testimony, including Gilmore’s previous The
368 BOOK REVIEW

Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Cornell, 2003), Kay

Schaffer and Sid Smith’s Human Rights and Narrated Lives: An Ethics of
Recognition (2004), and Gillian Whitlock’s Soft Weapons (2007) and
Postcolonial Life Narrative: Testimonial Transactions (2015). A welcome,
urgent, and explicitly feminist contribution to this field, Tainted Witness
introduces concepts that critics will find indispensable as they seek to respond
both to the continuing memoir boom, and to the proliferation of testimony.
The versatile concept of “adequate witness,” for instance, should find wide
applicability as institutions and individuals struggle to respond to allegations
of sexual harm today. An adequate witness, as Gilmore defines it, “is one
who will receive testimony without deforming it by doubt, and without sub-
stituting different terms of value for the ones offered by the witness herself”
(5). For example, in a case of alleged sexual assault, when “no force” is
offered as a response for a woman’s claim of “no consent,” the terms of her
testimony have been changed to deny her agency and devalue her testimony
(Kennedy and McCann). An adequate witness will resist “the rush to
judgment” and instead, will learn how “to attend to accounts of gendered
harm and agency made by impure victims in conditions of complexity”
(Gilmore 5). Crucial here is Gilmore’s recognition that women’s accounts of
sexual harm and trauma may appear inconsistent and may shift over time
when relayed to different audiences, for different purposes, and in different
contexts. Allowing time for the complexities of a testimonial account to
emerge, and for more considered and critically aware reflection, an adequate
witness can “preempt the processes of judgment that taint a witness” (5).
Through its nuanced analyses of complex and difficult cases, Tainted Witness
brilliantly models the “adequate witnessing” Gilmore advocates.

Works Cited
Beard, Mary. Women and Power: A Manifesto. London: Profile Books, 2017.
Kennedy, Rosanne, and Hannah McCann. “Splitting from Halley: Doing Justice
to Race, Unwantedness, and Testimony in Campus Sexual Assault.” Signs.
Forthcoming.

Rosanne Kennedy
Australian National University
Rosanne.Kennedy@anu.edu.au
This article was originally published with errors, which have now been
corrected in the online version. Please see Correction
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2019.1637084)

# 2019 Rosanne Kennedy

https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2019.1592386