Book Review - Rev. of Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives

Abstract

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 typically not in control of the forum of judgment and is unable to provide relevant context. Show more