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Speaking Out: Feminism, Rape and Narrative Politics
This is the first critical study of feminist practices of ‘speaking out’ in response to rape. This book argues that feminist anti-rape politics are characterised by a belief in the transformative potential of women’s personal narratives of sexual violence. The political mobilisation of these narratives has been an incredibly successful strategy, but one with unresolved ethical questions and political limitations. The book explores both the successes and the unresolved questions through feminist archival materials, published narratives of sexual violence, and mass media and internet sources. It argues that that a rethinking of the role and place of women’s stories and the politics of speaking out is vital for a rethinking of feminist politics around sexual violence and key to fresh approaches to combating this violence.
271 pages, Paperback
Published February 18, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 10, 2021
Serisier deploys literary theory to analyze memoirs, victim impact statements, online survivor stories, and anthropological accounts of sexual violence. She argues that speaking out in and of itself does not constitute feminist politics; instead, we must understand how narratives make meaning and organize collectively for feminist meaning making and social change or run the risk of exacerbating white supremacy and strengthening the neoliberal carceral state. Serisier builds on existing scholarship to show how narratives and scripts of crime, race, gender, and now neoliberalism, shape and curtail not only policy solutions, but survivors’ attempts to make meaning of their own experiences. Speaking out can make problems visible and consciousness raising can generate theory, but both are fraught with dangers feminists need to recognize and overcome through political action.
Serisier does not write about her own experiences in Speaking Out, but her book joins a pantheon of books by scholars who have brought their research expertise and theoretical prowess to bear to understand their own experiences of sexual violence. In the last forty-five years, scholar/survivors in literary theory, philosophy, history, psychology, law, political science, and the neuroscience of trauma have helped us move from writing about rape as a topic to using sexual violence as a location to challenge core disciplinary questions. Gifted creative writers and reflective journalists, too, have enlarged the conversation by crafting survivor narratives that deepen and broaden our understanding.
Sarah Winnemucca and Rosa Parks campaigned against rape long before the emergence of second-wave feminism, but second-wave feminists reframed rape as a gender and feminist issue, put it on the public agenda, and dislodged the hegemony of thinking of it exclusively as a crime. Susan Brownmiller’s canonical text, Against Our Will (1975), may have drawn on racial stereotypes, employed an unhelpful gender binary, and focused too much on rape in exceptional circumstances such as war. Serisier, Sharon Marcus (1992), Leigh Gilmore (2017) others have shown how the feminist movement created a community of listeners—a precondition for speaking about rape. Existing narrative scripts and genre, however, shaped the meaning they gave to their own experiences and more importantly, how listeners interpreted their stories. White women raped by Black strangers fit the conventional rape script which Sharon Block shows emerged in the colonial period (2007) and were thus more likely to find publishers. These breakthrough accounts also too often conformed to or were read under the neoliberal genre of heroic individual victim overcoming adversity.
The legal arena provides survivors such as Channel Miller (assaulted by the Stanford swimmer Brock Turner) the opportunity to craft victim statement that journalists and legislators amply through social media, but it shapes that discourse and narrows our ability to craft policy solutions beyond punishment or damages. Whether speaking out as memoirists, journalists, academics, or fiction writers, Serisier shows how the the stories enabled by speaking out become a predominately white genre. Serisier’s analysis of #Metoo and Black Lives Matter joins the literary analysis of rape narratives to those feminists seeking an intersectional approach and skeptical about expanding the reach and power of the carceral state and thus troubles any easy movement from shining a spotlight on the issue—speaking out—and crafting a feminist policy solution that does not strengthen white supremacy.
Because Serisier concludes that speaking out is both a form of politics and a genre of stories (narrative) it is not necessarily feminist or transformative. Preexisting understandings of rape (a crime Black strangers do to white women, women as tainted witnesses, a trauma resilient individuals overcome, a crime of sexual deviants) repress a more capacious politics where we imagine a world without rape and work to create it. The constraints of narrative limit the radical possibilities of speaking up. We need to include all victims of sexual violence in #Metoo but recognizing a common we of victimization is only one step to constructing the we capable of taking coordinated action. As we imagine and work toward a feminist future without sexual coercion that we must understand and counteract neoliberal and racist frames that strengthen the carceral state. Survivors trying to make sense of their experiences, activists working against sexual violence, those seeking to craft feminist theory, discourse, and politics, sociologists and policy scholars seeking to understand social problems, gender scholars, and those who study rape will all want to read this important book.
Block, Sharon. 2006. Rape and Sexual Power in Early America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Brownmiller, Susan. 1975. Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Denhollander, Rachael. 2019. What Is a Girl Worth?: My Story of Breaking the Silence and Exposing the Truth about Larry Nassar and USA Gymnastics. Carol Stream, Illinois: Tyndale Momentum.
Gilmore, Leigh. 2017. Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say about Their Lives. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gray-Rosendale, Laura, ed. 2020. Me Too, Feminist Theory, and Surviving Sexual Violence in the Academy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Marcus, Sharon. 1992. “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words; a Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention.” In Feminists Theorize the Political, 385–403. New York: Routledge.
Miller, Chanel. 2019. A Memoir. New York: Viking.
Prout, Chessy. 2018. A High School Survivor’s Story of Sexual Assault, Justice, and Hope. New York: Margaret K. McElderry Books.
Sally J. Kenney is a political scientist and the executive director of the Newcomb Institute of Tulane University. Her most recent book is Gender and Justice: Why Women Judges Really Matter, (New York, Routledge 2013). She teaches courses on rape and advocates for policies that eliminate sexual assault on campus.
Serisier does not write about her own experiences in Speaking Out, but her book joins a pantheon of books by scholars who have brought their research expertise and theoretical prowess to bear to understand their own experiences of sexual violence. In the last forty-five years, scholar/survivors in literary theory, philosophy, history, psychology, law, political science, and the neuroscience of trauma have helped us move from writing about rape as a topic to using sexual violence as a location to challenge core disciplinary questions. Gifted creative writers and reflective journalists, too, have enlarged the conversation by crafting survivor narratives that deepen and broaden our understanding.
Sarah Winnemucca and Rosa Parks campaigned against rape long before the emergence of second-wave feminism, but second-wave feminists reframed rape as a gender and feminist issue, put it on the public agenda, and dislodged the hegemony of thinking of it exclusively as a crime. Susan Brownmiller’s canonical text, Against Our Will (1975), may have drawn on racial stereotypes, employed an unhelpful gender binary, and focused too much on rape in exceptional circumstances such as war. Serisier, Sharon Marcus (1992), Leigh Gilmore (2017) others have shown how the feminist movement created a community of listeners—a precondition for speaking about rape. Existing narrative scripts and genre, however, shaped the meaning they gave to their own experiences and more importantly, how listeners interpreted their stories. White women raped by Black strangers fit the conventional rape script which Sharon Block shows emerged in the colonial period (2007) and were thus more likely to find publishers. These breakthrough accounts also too often conformed to or were read under the neoliberal genre of heroic individual victim overcoming adversity.
The legal arena provides survivors such as Channel Miller (assaulted by the Stanford swimmer Brock Turner) the opportunity to craft victim statement that journalists and legislators amply through social media, but it shapes that discourse and narrows our ability to craft policy solutions beyond punishment or damages. Whether speaking out as memoirists, journalists, academics, or fiction writers, Serisier shows how the the stories enabled by speaking out become a predominately white genre. Serisier’s analysis of #Metoo and Black Lives Matter joins the literary analysis of rape narratives to those feminists seeking an intersectional approach and skeptical about expanding the reach and power of the carceral state and thus troubles any easy movement from shining a spotlight on the issue—speaking out—and crafting a feminist policy solution that does not strengthen white supremacy.
Because Serisier concludes that speaking out is both a form of politics and a genre of stories (narrative) it is not necessarily feminist or transformative. Preexisting understandings of rape (a crime Black strangers do to white women, women as tainted witnesses, a trauma resilient individuals overcome, a crime of sexual deviants) repress a more capacious politics where we imagine a world without rape and work to create it. The constraints of narrative limit the radical possibilities of speaking up. We need to include all victims of sexual violence in #Metoo but recognizing a common we of victimization is only one step to constructing the we capable of taking coordinated action. As we imagine and work toward a feminist future without sexual coercion that we must understand and counteract neoliberal and racist frames that strengthen the carceral state. Survivors trying to make sense of their experiences, activists working against sexual violence, those seeking to craft feminist theory, discourse, and politics, sociologists and policy scholars seeking to understand social problems, gender scholars, and those who study rape will all want to read this important book.
Block, Sharon. 2006. Rape and Sexual Power in Early America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Brownmiller, Susan. 1975. Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Denhollander, Rachael. 2019. What Is a Girl Worth?: My Story of Breaking the Silence and Exposing the Truth about Larry Nassar and USA Gymnastics. Carol Stream, Illinois: Tyndale Momentum.
Gilmore, Leigh. 2017. Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say about Their Lives. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gray-Rosendale, Laura, ed. 2020. Me Too, Feminist Theory, and Surviving Sexual Violence in the Academy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Marcus, Sharon. 1992. “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words; a Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention.” In Feminists Theorize the Political, 385–403. New York: Routledge.
Miller, Chanel. 2019. A Memoir. New York: Viking.
Prout, Chessy. 2018. A High School Survivor’s Story of Sexual Assault, Justice, and Hope. New York: Margaret K. McElderry Books.
Sally J. Kenney is a political scientist and the executive director of the Newcomb Institute of Tulane University. Her most recent book is Gender and Justice: Why Women Judges Really Matter, (New York, Routledge 2013). She teaches courses on rape and advocates for policies that eliminate sexual assault on campus.
February 27, 2026
Not much new here and reading dated by now. Sharon Marcus’s 1992 article, often criticized by rape studies scholars as victim-blaming and ableist, makes several appearances as a theoretical foundation for Serisier’s argument about intervening in the plot of inevitable rape. Overall, this is a book that centers “discourse on discourse” and thereby misses that rape, politics, and narrative itself are material and embodied practices. The thought staged in this book ends up being narrow and circular and way too mired in adjudicative logics. You cannot narrate a culture out of rape which is why Serisier’s non-conclusion remains without substance. The book is useful for its diligent review of rape memoirs since the 1970s.
September 30, 2022
I'll have to think about this a bit more but I found it surprisingly insightful, very clear, well-presented and nuanced. Felt like I got a bit more of a view of a feminist history I did not know much about. For someone with more in-depth knowledge of the topic it might not be as interesting, but I'm glad I did decide to read all of it (I was not planning on it).
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews