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Gendered Testimonies at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century

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Abstract

In this chapter, Michael defines gendered testimonies and delineates surrounding cultures to provide opportunities for develo** useful insights for those working in this area. She investigates testimonies from inside and outside academia, as well as on- and offline, to analyse thematic currents like testimony and the power to speak, to listen and to be heard; legal versus cathartic and artistic expressions of testimony, and the possibilities and challenges of speaking out in an increasingly hybrid digitalised world. While discussing the new bind of silencing and discounting that manifests itself through online misogynist subcultures, she also reflects on testimonies that reach encouraging support networks, and points to ways of mitigating (narrative) violence for professionals, academics, readers, witnesses and survivors.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Although #MeToo gained unprecedented global attention in 2017 after sexual harassment allegations against Harvey Weinstein, MeToo is an organisation that was founded in 2007 by African American activist Tarana Burke to support girls and women of colour who have survived sexual violence (Gilmore, 2017).

  2. 2.

    Margaretta Jolly (2014: 5) also notes that “the art of [testimonial] life narrative […] can work as a crucial complement to legal or governmental action”.

  3. 3.

    Examples of such long-term sexual relationships include, inter alia, undergraduate and postgraduate students/researchers and professors/supervisors and adoptive or biological daughters with father figures.

  4. 4.

    See also Jacques Derrida’s (2004) letter to the Chancellor of Irvine University, California, in which the philosopher threatens to remove all the work he had donated to the university if it took action based on allegations of sexual misconduct against his friend and colleague Dragan Kujundzic, while also discrediting the accuser’s testimony: http://www.jacques-derrida.org/Cicerone.html.

  5. 5.

    For the letter see: http://www.ubcaccountable.com/open-letter/steven-galloway-ubc/.

  6. 6.

    Margaret Atwood later apologised. Extremist sub-cultures associated with men’s rights activist groups like incels (from involuntary celibacy) have carried out public attacks and they use social media and other online platforms like YouTube to proselytise and to perpetuate their misogynistic views and ideologies that at times promote hate crimes like murder and rape (see Papadamou et al., 2020; Tomkinson et al., 2020).

  7. 7.

    In relation to leaving traces and demanding accountability, see the Academic Misconduct Database: https://academic-sexual-misconduct-database.org/index.php/incidents.

  8. 8.

    See also Paula Uimonen’s (2019: 2) analysis of the digital archive of gendered testimonies of abuse as part of Sweden’s “difficult cultural heritage” that was made possible through “hashtag visuality” and emerged via the Nordic Museum’s campaign, which aimed at capturing the #MeToo moment in Sweden in 2017.

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  1. University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus

    Olga Michael

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  1. Olga Michael
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Correspondence to Olga Michael .

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  1. University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

    Sara Jones

  2. University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

    Roger Woods

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Michael, O. (2023). Gendered Testimonies at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century. In: Jones, S., Woods, R. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Testimony and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13794-5_5

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