How to Believe Women: Towards a model of Feminist Media Witnessing

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How to Believe Women

Towards a model of Feminist Media Witnessing for

sexual assault survivors in a U.S. media context

Eliza Connolly

University of Amsterdam

In partial fulfillment of the

Master’s of Arts Degree in

New Media and Digital Culture

June 28, 2019

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Abstract

Within media studies, witnessing has often invoked moral authority and ethical responsibility. In calling for witnesses, we search for the truth, we navigate the often-murky past, and we plan for the future. This work considers the ways that sexual assault survivors have been excluded from these significant processes. It argues that current and former strategies for enacting and analyzing media witnessing have depended on and perpetuate gender discrimination in sexual assault witnessing based on gendered discourses of speech and truth, leaving survivors’ testimony neglected, discredited, and powerless. This work proposes a new theory of feminist media

witnessing: strategies of media witnessing that account for the gender hierarchies and

discrimination inherent in media witnessing, and which place subjects equitably in relation to speech, truth, and authority. Using case studies, two strategies for feminist media witnessing are defined and analyzed: validating witness, which is explored in relation to sexual assault

witnessing videos on YouTube, and establishing an irreducible, authoritative collective witness, which is investigated using the anonymous reporting application JDoe. Both cases focus on the affordances and limitations of bearing witness to sexual assault on their specific platforms, considering the modes of witnessing that these platforms delimit or make possible for survivors and their audiences. Ultimately, this work asks why, despite there being low, even negligible counts of false accusations, do survivors encounter insurmountable obstacles to bearing witness, and unimaginable barriers to credibility, validation, and response? Media witnessing is set up and enacted in ways that make audiences predisposed to dismiss or disregard their testimony; how might they be set up differently? In proposing strategies for feminist media witnessing, this work aims to make visible the pervasive and systemic devaluation of women’s testimony, voice, and experience, and also to demonstrate that new media technologies can enable survivors to bear witness in ways that position them equitably in relation to truth and authority. Witnesses fill in, stand for, and affect the collective, historical record. If witnessing is allowed such prestige, it must involve ethical and equitable relations. At stake is not only the testimony of the individual, but the truth of the collective: the policies, records, laws, logics, rationales, and principles that rest on the stories we hold to be true.

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Introduction: the perfect witness

In the recent scope of he-said-she-said cases, one of the most significant was Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against United States Supreme Court (then) nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. Upon hearing of Kavanaugh’s nomination, Ford, a professor of clinical psychology at Palo Alto University, decided to disclose that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her as a teenager. Although she first attempted to remain anonymous, news of the allegation spread, and Ford eventually testified publically against Kavanaugh in a special hearing by the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 4, 2018.

The reach of Ford’s testimony was enormous. Nielson ratings indicate that, at any given moment during the hearing, 65 million Americans with home televisions were watching.

Viewers tuned in on flights, in bars, in university lectures, and on their mobile phones (Griggs et al. 2018). Although overall digital media viewership is difficult to assess, CNN reported that the hearing had an exceptional impact on live streaming, reaching over ten million viewers on their combined channels (CNN website, Facebook and YouTube)—numbers unseen since President Trump’s inauguration in 2016 (Stelter 2018). The broadcast’s impact reveals a heightened awareness for how sexual assault cases are currently mediated. However, the story that unfolded across multiple platforms and through various media was not only about sexual assault, but of one woman’s ability to testify, to bear witness to her own suffering, and to be heard.

During the hearing, Ford remained impossibly composed, gracious and polite as she described her assault. She received all questions with consideration, and answered fully and respectfully. As a professor of psychology, she was able to give compelling and intelligent explanations for gaps in her memory, and was supported by corroborating accounts from her husband and therapist, both of whom had heard her recount details of the incident years

beforehand. Nevertheless, Ford’s witness was insufficient to prompt recourse. The investigative counsel for the Kavanaugh-Ford Hearing concluded that that Ford’s testimony was insubstantial evidence because it lacked consistency: her claim that the assault occurred in the ‘mid 1980s’, the ‘early 80s’, ‘one summer in the early 80s’, and ‘the summer of 1982’ had “not offered a consistent account of when the alleged assault happened” (Analysis of Dr. Christine Blasey

Ford’s Allegations to All Republican Senators 2018, 2).

The council’s conclusion demonstrates the inordinate requirements that Ford’s account must have met in order for her testimony to be consequential, and the substantial barriers to

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credence that sexual assault survivors encounter in formal, juridical settings. The hearing’s outcome also exemplifies the ways that survivors’ testimony is regularly disregarded, rendered ineffective and even made harmful to the witness. Ford’s testimony ultimately did nothing to deter the processes already in motion to appoint Kavanaugh, while she herself has since received numerous death threats, and was forced to move her family from their home and hire private security due to harassment and safety concerns (Mak 2018). It is significant that in such a case, it is the witness that suffers the repercussions of her own testimony; it is her credibility that comes under fire, her security that is sacrificed.

However, the most intriguing aspect of the hearing was that “Ford was, in many ways, an ideal witness” (Edwards 2018). In fact, she was a “Perfect” witness (Carroll 2018). She had all the underpinnings of privilege in the U.S.; she is white, heterosexual, from an upper-class background and with a respected reputation, profession and family. She appeared to uphold every nuanced detail of respectability. She did not become agitated, angry, frantic, or overly emotional during the hearing, keeping her voice soft and her manner poised and polite. She offered coherent and consistent accounts of her assault, and gave intelligent explanations of the effects of trauma on memory and perception when she could not remember small details (which her education as a clinical psychologist allows her). She was resolute without being assertive, smart but not imposing, gracious but not yielding—all of those tenuous qualities that make up the thin line of credibility afforded to women. Ford was lauded by Republican senator Orrin Hatch as “an attractive, good witness” (Carroll 2018) and even by U.S. President Donald Trump as “a very credible witness” (Reints 2018). She was commended by the council for speaking out (Carroll 2018). So begs the question: what happened? If Ford, a woman with nearly all the underpinnings of privilege, respectability, and credibility in the United States, was still

considered an inadequate witness, where was the woman whose sexual assault testimony would be impactful? “If a woman like Ford could not halt the machinery of power,” wrote TIME correspondent Haley Edwards, “there seemed to be little hope for anyone else” (2018).

Ford’s testimony exposes a problem in current conceptions of witnessing.

Conventionally, ‘bearing witness’ implies heavy moral responsibility and obligation to testify. To witness is to burden oneself with the task of clarifying the historical record (Felman and Laub 1992; Caruth 1996; Ellis, Seeing Things; Peters 2001; Frosh 2006). In such accounts of

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trusted to have the moral prerogative to tell the factual and truthful version of events” (Mortensen 2015, 1397). A ‘perfect’ witness would therefore be a veritable Iustitia, their historical clarity and moral compass so uncompromising that their contribution to the historical record would never be doubted. And yet, this is not what happened—this is never what happens —when women seek to bear witness to sexual assault. Women’s witness in such cases is almost universally insufficient: only 2% of rapes reported to police lead to a felony conviction,

according to statistics collected by the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (2019). Sexual violence is the least likely type of violent crime to lead to prosecution (RAINN, "The Criminal Justice System"). Women face innumerable and often insurmountable obstacles to bearing witness to sexual assault, and even when they do manage to testify, they are often disparaged, patronized, and made vulnerable to further harm. When it comes to bearing witness, there is a noticeable gap in the scholarship where women’s testimony and the testimony of sexual assault survivors have been ignored.

Mediated sexual assault witnessing has not been newly neglected by accounts of media witnessing. In fact, Ford’s story garnered significant attention because of its striking similarity to Anita Hill’s 1991 testimony against her supervisor, Clarence Thomas, who had also been

nominated to the Supreme Court at the time. However, although these cases suffered the same outcome in terms of formal, legal impact, the ways that they were mediated were entirely distinct. The Kavanaugh-Ford hearing represented the first time in American history that digital media technologies played a significant role in the mass witnessing of a woman’s sexual assault testimony. Diverse features across social media platforms and new media technologies enabled audiences to interact with, build on, and spread Ford’s testimony in ways that were simply not available to Hill’s audiences in 1991. The hashtag #WhyIDidntReport was created in response to President Trump demanding to know why Ford did not report the incident at the time. Thousands of viewers tuned in to the hearing via Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Live video streams enabled them to share, comment on, and react to the proceedings as they unfolded (Griggs et al. 2018): these technical features became a part of the proceedings; they informed the ways the hearing was approached, viewed, understood, and integrated into public consciousness.

While Ford testified in a highly procedural, formal and juridical setting, the stakes of bearing witness to sexual assault extend far beyond the courtroom. Indeed, what the scale of #WhyIDidntReport demonstrates is that witnessing is rarely conducted for a formal jury. New

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and different modes of witnessing were forming during the hearing, far beyond the standard framework of the Senate’s formal political stage. The ways that platform-enabled responses, such as #WhyIDidntReport, drew upon digital media platforms and practices raises new

questions of mediated witnessing: what can digital media offer sexual assault survivors in terms of witnessing, both in and outside of a legal framework? Can digital media enable a different mode of witnessing, one that might avoid the worn and gendered narratives of sexual assault? And, if we are to be “witnesses without a tribunal” (Peters 722), how might we use digital media to find recourse?

In answering these questions, this work aims to investigate the possibilities for new media technologies to enable ethical and equitable modes of witnessing for women and sexual assault survivors. It builds off work from both feminist media studies and media witnessing scholarship to develop strategies for “feminist media witnessing”: a framework for witnessing that accounts for the gendered inequalities that affect wider witnessing structures and practices, and which works to interrupt or circumvent them. The following analysis is divided into four chapters and begins by establishing the current condition of media witnessing in relation to gender and gendered discourses of sexual assault. The historical and political relationship between truth, speech, and gender and between media and gender are examined through a feminist lens in order to determine how contemporary accounts of media witnessing perpetuate gendered claims to authority and legitimacy. The second chapter will offer a definition for feminist media witnessing in relation to the insufficiencies identified in the media witnessing tradition, and will outline two strategies for enacting feminist media witnessing: validating

witness and establishing an irreducible, authoritative collective witness. In the third chapter, this

critical framework will then be put to the test and exemplified in two case studies.

The first case study will examine sexual assault witnessing videos on YouTube, or what this work refers to as the “testimonial re-call” genre, and how they work to validate survivors’ witness. The second case study investigates the mobile app JDoe, and how its reporting form and digital map facilitate a mutual witnessing that foregrounds the collective as an authority. At stake in these cases is what digital media can offer survivors in terms of bearing witness to sexual assault: what they make possible, what audience practices they encourage, and how they enable or constrain certain practices of engagement and testimony. The central driving question in both cases will be: how might this particular form of digital media facilitate a feminist media

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witnessing for survivors’ testimony? Finally, this work concludes by discussing further

opportunities to investigate inequitable witnessing practices and reflecting on the consequences that feminist media witnessing has on the witnessing tradition.

This work finds that digital media offer new modes of witnessing that work to end the discrimination and historical stigmatization that discredit and disparage women and survivors’ witness. It contributes to the study of media witnessing by creating a new theory for approaching mediated witnessing, and providing strategies for the application of digital methods in the critical analysis of contemporary witnessing practices. It also enhances knowledge about sexual assault mediation and communication as a pressing societal issue, and so additionally contributes to a sub-field of work in feminist media studies concerned with the intersection of media and gender in areas where gender violence is prevalent. Following feminist media studies, this work

understands gender-based violence, oppression, and discrimination in digitally mediated spaces as pressing structural problems that urgently and desperately require conviction and justice, but which first and foremost need new ways of inviting and bearing witness, of hearing testimony, producing judgment, and especially of cultivating authority, understanding, and belief.

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Chapter One:

Contemporary media witnessing and gender

The concept and practice of “feminist media witnessing” refers to strategies of enacting and receiving testimony that position women and—by the extent of the gendered discourse of sexual assault—sexual assault survivors equitably in regards to truth and authority when they attempt to bear witness. Feminist media witnessing rests on the precept that gendered discourses position women and survivors as illegitimate or negligible witnesses in media representations, media technologies, and media witnessing theories. It therefore works predominantly to interrupt and circumvent the processes by which women and survivors’ witness is devalued, discredited, and made powerless in its mediation and communication.

What this chapter aims to make explicit is the current condition of women and survivors’ witness in regards to media witnessing practices concerning sexual assault. Any consideration of feminist media witnessing must first be contextualized within media witnessing traditions and their inadequate attention to gender. Of specific interest will be issues of speech and truth in regards to women’s witness. Second, the concept must take into account the ways in which media are themselves gendered, and so turns to feminist media studies to enhance and identify the ways that media afford and delimit witnessing practices according to gendered conceptions of speech and truth. Then, these two frameworks will be used to guide an exploration of previous and current media witnessing strategies, illustrating the ways that media witnessing theory perpetuates inequitable discourse and practices by neglecting gender in its considerations.

1.1 Witnessing and media witnessing

Witnessing, above all, involves transformation. To witness is to translate bodily experience into communal text: mobile, shareable, repeatable and disentangled from subjectivity or singularity. But this translation is hardly simple or effortless. Witnessing provokes risk for the witness, who becomes immutably attached to the event, “You can be marked for life by being the witness of an event,” (Peters 714). Peters uses the example of the Roman poet Ovid, who was banished “for

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seeing something in the emperor’s court he wasn’t supposed to,” (714) but one can also think of the logics and necessity of the Witness Protection Program, the fate of political whistle-blowers living in asylum, and even of Christine Blasey Ford, still currently in the protection of private security. To witness is to look back, as Orpheus at Eurydice: a glance irrevocable, unmistakable, and which transforms the nature and meaning of the memory as well as the fate of the viewer. To call on a witness is also to acknowledge a need for clarification and guidance, to admit the partiality of the narrative so far. Witnesses engage with the terrain of the uncertain, the insecure. In witnessing, they clarify and establish the foundations of the record—public, historical, legal etc. Their testimony marks the past and present as easily and permanently as it marks the witnesses themselves. In its extreme, witnessing is catastrophic transformation of both. Willem de Kooning, considering the witnesses of the atomic bomb, writes: “Today, some people think that the light of the atomic bomb will change the concept of painting once and for all. The eyes that actually saw the light melted out of sheer ecstasy” (1951, 7).

Media witnessing is both a new concept and an ancient phenomenon. For one, witnessing

is necessarily mediated. In his oft-cited, seminal work of the genre, “Witnessing”, John Durham Peters writes that witnessing is a twofold process of “passive seeing” and “active saying” (2001, 709). It is itself a process of mediation, he argues, an act of relaying one’s experience to others who did not and could not have had the same experience. In this way, witnessing has always relied on technologies of communication, and has been enhanced and constrained by the affordances of these technologies. Continually updated, renewed, and occasionally made obsolete, media technologies change not only the conventions of witnessing, but also “what it means to witness” (Frosh 2006, 265). Attention must be paid, therefore, to the specific modes of witnessing that media technologies enable, and what assumptions they carry.

The field of media witnessing can be organized by two primary ‘transitions’: the transition from individual to collective, and from speech to truth (Figure 1). By intersecting, these transitions create a framework for witnessing that has structured previous conceptions and strategies within the field. Organizing the field of media witnessing as an intersection of two transitions is appropriate because it underscores the transformative and irrevocable nature of witnessing, while also portraying it as a kind of boundary work, which emphasizes the ways the witness’ potential and prestige is marked by exclusion, obstruction, and interruption—the roadblocks that define and delimit who can bear witness, to what, and how they do so. These

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transitions enable witnesses to be produced, but also indicate where individual speech is

prevented from achieving moral authority, excluded from the historical record, and stalled in its attempt to create impact.

Figure 1: Classical witnessing model

The first transition of the classical model is from individual to collective. As Mette Mortensen has noted, although the literature has concerned a wealth of topics from a variety of disciplines, witnessing scholarship has been centrally concerned with “the way and extent to which testimonies from singular individuals may be said to deal with collective experiences” (1394). The ability to transcend singularity is an inherent tenet of media witnessing scholarship (Ellis, Seeing Things 26; Peters 710). Jacques Derrida writes that each act of witnessing works to transform the irretrievable, fleeting “instant” into an accessible, repeatable “instance”; something that can be watched and re-watched, analyzed at length and accessed well after its original moment (The instant of my death 41). What were once “privately personal ontologies” (Peters 711) limited to the individual body are now circulated with universal relevance. Although witnessing scholars have agreed that this translation from the individual to the larger collective is “precarious” (Peters 709), it remains fundamental to the tradition.

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The second transition of witnessing is from speech to truth. In the classical model, the witness moves simultaneously from individual to collective and from speech to truth. Both transitions are required in order to give witnesses moral authority and access to the historical record. But how does speech become truth? What enables the witness to speak on behalf of both the collective and of history? Mortensen argues that media witnessing literature has relied on the idea that the witness testifies “for the sake of justice and the common good” (1398). This is partly due to foundational research from the 1990s (Felman and Laub 1992; Caruth 1996), which examined the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, and so envisioned witnessing as a moral and ethical burden (Mortensen 1397). The witness, in this conception, represents not only a

subjective experience, but a retrospective, moral fact; “to witness means to be on the right side [of history]” (Peters 714). Witnesses already occupy a position of moral authority and

legitimacy. The convicted murderer is not a witness to his crime just as, Peters argues, a Nazi’s account of WWII would not qualify as witnessing. To witness is to speak, and be vindicated.

For these reasons, the figure of the witness has been afforded a certain prestige because they represent radical possibility for reorienting ourselves to the past: “witnesses contribute to laying new, fragile ground through their testimonies […] a vision of the world that is re-made at the very moment when witnessing becomes relevant” (Wagner-Pacifici 2005, 206, in Mortensen 1396). The uncertain terrain that the witness navigates becomes the moral foundation of our collective history. The significance—political, cultural, and moral—of the witness is emblematic of their role in curating social understanding and reflexivity. In testifying, they clarify, rectify and establish social truth; they direct our human enterprise.

1.1.1 The veracity gap

Peters and other media scholars have called these transitions ‘precarious’, and they certainly are. It is difficult to cross the boundaries between individual speech and collective truth—it must be, in order to safeguard and regulate who, exactly, is endowed with moral authority and who determines the details and meaning of past events. These are coveted, powerful positions, and so their borders have always been challenging to overcome. Peters offers an invaluable concept for understanding the difficulty of speaking on behalf of collective truth: the veracity gap.

Coined in “Witnessing”, the veracity gap refers to the impossibility of translating ‘seeing’ into ‘saying’, personal experience into public utterance. Regardless of the medium, Peters

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argues, witnessing is plagued by unreliable translation: “Sensation is encircled into privately personal ontologies. Only words are public” (711). Derrida writes that testimony invokes uncertainty, that it “always goes hand in hand with at least the possibility of fiction, perjury, lie” ("Archive Fever" 27). Words can be ambiguous or misleading, memory can be faulty, and two people who experienced the same event may recall different, contradictory details. Even

perfectly recorded events are up for interpretation, and are influenced by the ways in which they are transmitted as well as the audience that receives them. Witnesses and witnessing, Peters explains, have always required testing and regulation. Pain, for example, has usually policed the veracity gap; “From the ancient Greeks to ‘modern’ intelligence-gathering, the effort to assure the transition from sensation to sentences in testimony has involved torture” (711). Pain is one way of limiting who can bear witness, and appropriate demonstrations of agony have often served as evidence of truth. One woman, watching the Kavanaugh-Ford hearing, critiqued Ford for laughing, “If this really happened to you and it was serious, you wouldn’t laugh at all” (Griggs et al. 2018).

Although pain is one method of enforcing the veracity gap, the most significant practice of regulating witness is through exclusion. Peters lists a few categories that have historically been pre-judged as unable to bear witness: “Non-Christians, convicts, interested parties, spouses, children, the insane,” (711) etc. These groups have been automatically disqualified from

witnessing; their words are understood to be inherently unreliable, and so they could never cross the veracity gap and transition from individual speech to collective truth. The veracity gap can therefore also be connected to identity. Here, the framework of the classical witnessing model starts to become suspect: the veracity gap structures the transformation from individual speech to collective truth by bordering the two transitions. It defines and limits who can become a witness and moral authority, whose words are heard, validated and acted upon. In the classical model, the veracity gap would be the point where the two transitions intersect. However, certain social roles, identities, and subject positions also invoke and precede the veracity gap. They are marked as unreliable before they bear witness, meaning that there is an exclusionary process that

precedes or exceeds the classical model. In focusing on the two primary transitions, the classical model ignores the ways that the possibility of witnessing is already limited before the potential witness has even spoken, perhaps even before they have experienced the event itself.

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The veracity gap is a useful concept to feminist media witnessing because it understands witnessing to be an exclusionary and privileged process of speaking for the collective, and so insists on regulation and restriction. And yet, classically, the veracity gap is a universalized problem. Anyone attempting to bear witness will eventually face the dilemma that “Only words are public,” (711) and so the difficulty of bearing witness has been generalized as an inherent and uniformly oppressive fact of witnessing, obscuring any additional barriers that potential witnesses might face. The concept is therefore extended in this work to illustrate the ways that social hierarchies and power structures inform the ways witnessing is defined and limited beyond those ‘on the right side of history’, and so is capable of perpetuating inequitable and oppressive practices of exclusion. This exclusion is especially significant considering the weight of the witness as moral authority and safeguard of public memory, knowledge, and history.

In order to understand how the classical model becomes impractical once gender

considerations are applied, the relevant operations of gender must be examined. Before outlining the two primary strategies of the classical media witnessing tradition, two intersections between gender and media witnessing are considered: speech, truth and gender, and media and gender. These intersections complicate a simple execution of the classical model, and indicate where gender has been left out of theoretical considerations, leading to witnessing practices that position witnesses inequitably in relation to truth, authority, and response.

1.2 Speech, truth and gender

Who may speak, who may be heard and by whom, and whose speech is considered valuable and legitimate are all informed by hierarchies of gender, as well as those of race, class and other social power structures. In order to lay a specific framework, gender is taken as the main focus, however it must be considered within other, interlocking structures of power when put into practice (Hanisch 2000; Cooper 2016; Crenshaw 2016). This section turns to the tradition of feminist linguistics to examine the relationship between gender, speech, and truth. It especially relies on poststructuralist feminism (Bucholtz 2014, 24), which understands gender as

performative: not an inherent expression of true, natural, or inherent sexual difference, but the accumulative effect of enacting and repeating cultural norms (Butler 1990, 25-29). ‘Women’s speech’, in poststructuralist feminist linguistics, neither indicates the gender of the speaker, nor

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the speech itself, but the gendered position that the speaker occupies based on their relation to these linguistic cultural norms (Bucholtz 32).

Firstly, to say that ‘women’s speech’ does not reflect the gender of the speaker may seem counterintuitive, but it is a necessary step in beginning any analysis of sexual assault witnessing. Sexual assault is not an issue of gender, although it is a gendered issue. To say that sexual assault is an issue of gender would homogenize sexual assault survivors and exclude non-female

survivors. Other and all genders and sexes experience sexual assault. However, the way that sexual assault discourse is gendered ultimately understands and portrays sexual assault as a women’s problem, reducing the issue to the female gender, regardless of who experiences it (Dutton and White 2013, 5). Rape, for example, was legally defined in the majority of the United States as a crime against women until the 1980s, meaning that non-female rape survivors were legally illegitimate and disregarded (Young et al. 2018, 455). Similar myths about the gendered nature of sexual assault persist today: male survivors continue to experience discretization alongside a kind of feminization, the logic being that men cannot be sexually assaulted and so men who are sexually assaulted are, in fact, not men (Reitz-Krueger et al. 2017, 323).

Speakers become distinguished and gendered through their use of language, rather than by their gender alone. ‘Women’s speech’ is therefore used here to indicate the ways that the logic, forms, discourse, and hierarchies of sexual assault are gendered-female in their construction, and how other gendered discourses, such as those of speech and truth, then intersect to devalue the position of the gendered survivor1_{. Emphasizing the gendered logic of}

sexual assault over the gender of survivors enables an analysis of speech that foregrounds the ideological creation and subsequent trivialization of a gendered set of speaking positions and speaking practices (Bucholtz 26) specific to sexual assault.

Robin Lakoff’s foundational work, Language and Women’s Place, motivated researchers and theorists to begin investigating the relationship between gender and language (Thorne and Henley 1975; Rysman 1977; Bucholtz 2017; Jule 2008, 2017). In it, she argues that women’s speech is relegated to topics of no serious political value, and is therefore assigned a marginal position from which any speaking subject would be paid little attention (30). This

marginalization systematically distinguishes and excludes women’s speech from the language of the powerful, the political, and the significant, and “works against [the] treatment of women, as 1 ‘Women’s speech’ and ‘survivors’ speech’, as well as ‘women’s witness’ and ‘survivors’ witness’, are from here onwards used interchangeably, as they both refer to the gendered speaking position of the witness.

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serious persons” (1973, 45). Lakoff’ particular maneuver from definition and marginalization to political exclusion that she identifies was foundational to feminist linguistics (Bucholtz 26), and is useful for considering women’s witness because it foregrounds identity and positionality.

Women’s speech begins from a marginal, devalued position because of the position of its speaker. This should recall the ways the veracity gap can be attached to the individual’s identity before they give testimony. Theorists following Lakoff have noted that women’s speech has historically been denied a claim to legitimacy. It has been labeled ‘gossip’ (Rysman 1977; McHugh and Tousignant 1995) ‘chatter’, ‘chitchat’ (Tannen 1990), and ‘small talk’ (Coupland 2000), all terms that denigrate the quality of the speech and serve to undermine claims to

accuracy, validity, and consequence. Mary Beard has argued that men’s claim to political speech has historically been asserted through their silencing and relegation of women’s speech to the domestic realm (2017, 4). For Beard, legitimacy, truth, and power are discursively defined in opposition to women’s speaking position, making and marking it as illegitimate.

Linguistics scholars such as Allyson Jule argue that a Foucauldian analysis of speech and gender is particularly productive because it understands discourse to be the foundational tool of power (2008, 29). Discourse, writes Michel Foucault (1970; 1972; 1981), is used to determine what is possible, what is accepted, and what is normalized as truth or fact ("The Order of Discourse" 49). To be normalized, as Jule argues masculine language practices and speaking positions are (28), is to control the mechanisms of truth, which marginalize and disempower others through exclusion from the ‘normal’, dominant group. This exclusion can be understood as a process of definition and marginalization or preclusion. Abject groups are not expelled from the ‘normal’; rather the ‘normal’ is defined and made powerful in its rejection of the abject

(Chanter 2008, 92). Recall Beard’s argument that men claim power by silencing women—the

same process of definition and exclusion applies. Women’s speech is not illegitimate; rather men’s speech is made legitimate through the exclusion of women’s.

Truth then functions as a regulative mechanism, which reinforces and upholds distinct and gendered power structures. By defining rape as a crime against women, for example, legal discourse imposes limits on who can be treated as a rape survivor, defining rape in relation to gender in ways that exclude and discredit the real experiences of other gender positions. As Jule notes, groups at the top of the hierarchy mobilize discourse in order to create and reinforce normative boundaries, thereby maintaining their power through identification, definition, and

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exclusion (28-29). To gender speech—to gender discourse—is to reinforce gendered hierarchies of power based on the inclusion and normalization of the powerful.

Mary Bucholtz, summarizing the work of feminist linguistics, identifies “a culture-wide ideology that trivializes both women and women’s ways of speaking” (26, emphasis added). Because the discourse and logic of sexual assault works to attach survivors to a gendered

position, bearing witness to sexual assault becomes a linguistic practice that is inextricable from the illegitimate female speaking subject. In short, there are two simultaneous operations at work: the devaluation of the female speaking position, and the identification (and subsequent

devaluation) of the linguistic practice of bearing witness to sexual assault with the female

speaking position. It is through this dual strategy that sexual assault survivors find themselves in a double bind, discredited by their gendered speaking position.

In the following section, the relationship between media and gender is explored through technology (how media genders its users) and demonstrates this second turn of devaluation, where the gendering of subjects works to discredit them. However, the question of media representation, or how gender positions become illegitimate in media, is still of interest to this section because it demonstrates both the devaluation of the female speaking position and the prevention of a sexual assault collective (the second transition). In applying the gendered discourses of speech and truth, media representations indicate where both transitions of the classical witnessing model are interrupted.

In her article “Following the money”, Anita Biressi analyzes media coverage of the 2011 sexual assault case between Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant and a hotel maid, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a prominent French economist and politician. On May 14th_{, 2011, Ms.}

Diallo accused Strauss-Kahn of sexually assaulting her at the hotel where she worked, while he was on a business trip to New York. Although Strauss-Kahn was arrested and his semen was found on Diallo’s clothing and visibly bruised body, the charges were dismissed due to “doubts about Diallo’s credibility and […] inconclusive physical evidence” (2018, 2).

Biressi investigates Diallo’s claims to truth and power within the media discourse of sexual assault by compiling and analyzing Diallo’s representation in various media. In her analysis, she accounts not only for gender, but also for race and class, arguing that legitimate speech and subjecthood are policed by gendered, racialized, and economic discursive practices. Biressi begins by asserting that “Women who speak out in public, who complain or accuse do so

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under intense media scrutiny” (5). For Diallo, this scrutiny came with aggressive gendered, racialized, and economic logic, and worked to reduce her to ‘illegitimate’ subject positions: ‘the illegal immigrant’ (7), ‘the prostitute’ (8) ‘the gold-digger’, and ‘the honey trap’ (9). Biressi demonstrates that Diallo’s various, real subject positions—as an immigrant, a woman of color, and an underpaid hotel maid—were linguistically mobilized against her through headlines, image captions, and articles in order to discredit her speaking position, as well as her accusations. The New York Post’s headline ‘Gabby maid dooms own case’, for example, degrades Diallo’s speech as ‘gabby’ while implicating her subject position as a maid in order to diminish her claims as ‘doomed’ (4).

Diallo’s treatment demonstrates that “the female subject is always-already compromised. She is seen before she is heard and judged before she speaks […] Her precarious position is, a priori, a marker and testament to her unreliability” (10). Regardless of her speech or personal account, Diallo was already positioned within gendered, racialized, and economic hierarchies that worked to portray her as less—credible, powerful, consequential etc. These discourses located Diallo within power structures that delegitimized her speaking position in comparison to Strauss-Kahn, a rich and politically powerful white man. For Diallo, it was not her testimony, but her devalued identity and speaking positions within these various hierarchies that spoke for her and determined the worth of her words.

In devaluing the female speaking position and relegating sexual assault survivors to that position, the transition from speech to truth is interrupted in sexual assault witnessing. Biressi’s analysis demonstrates that the transition from speech to truth is precluded for Diallo based on her location within gender, race, and class power structures. However, she also demonstrates that the transition from individual to collective is similarly interrupted. Biressi argues that discretization tactics portray survivors’ stories as “individualized tragedies” in order to obscure “the grotesque systemic disparagement and silencing of women and women’s voices in the public sphere across time” (6). In order to discredit her, Diallo was first identified, defined, and made (overly)

specific in order to discard her testimony before it could speak for a larger collective. Melanie Randall offers a particularly succinct overview of the ways sexual assault survivors are disqualified by certain standards for what she calls, “the ideal sexual assault victim” (2010, 397) in legal frameworks. The myth of the ‘ideal victim’ excludes or devalues survivors that “deviate too far from stereotypical notions of “authentic” victims” (393),

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preventing the formation of a survivor-collective. The ‘ideal victim’ is first and foremost a woman—enforcing the relegation of survivors to a gendered-female position. This is one of the only positive criteria. The remaining criteria, as Randall notes, focus on what a survivor cannot be: a prostitute, a wife, racialized or marginalized because of race, in a fragile socio-economic position, under the influence of alcohol, dressed provocatively etc. (410). These negative

requirements work to simultaneously identify survivors (what they are) and discredit them (what they cannot be). The more specific the survivor becomes, as their identity is located within this credibility framework, the more likely her speech will be “automatically disqualified from the category of credible sexual assault victims” (409) and unable to contribute to a collective account. This is the ‘individualized tragedy’ that Biressi refers to: the survivor, always already entangled in incriminating discourses of gender, race, and class, begins from an illegitimate speaking position that is discarded for failing to adhere to the ‘ideal’—or ‘universal’—model of survivors. This prevents her from speaking on anyone’s behalf, even and especially her own.

Whose words may transition from individual speech to collective truth is inequitably influenced by gendered conceptions of both. Gendered hierarchies structure the exclusionary processes of witnessing, and work to portray the survivor’s speaking position as already

compromised and illegitimate. The problem of translation, of transitioning from speech to truth, is not uniform or universal because these operations preclude individual speech—they precede testimony, they precede the classical veracity gap. To universalize the difficulty of witnessing is to ignore the ways that witnesses are often already compromised before they enter the arena, their speech already determined to be illegitimate, and their access to authority and validation already denied. In order to treat survivors’ testimony equitably, any account of media witnessing must acknowledge the gender hierarchies that structure these discourses.

1.3 Media and gender

Earlier, witnessing was described as necessarily mediated. However, media do not simply enhance or accelerate the processes by which individual accounts come to ground our collective reality, and are not neutral in their mediation. Instead, media technologies shape, restrict and structure witnessing, and are charged with the same discourses that affect media representation. In pursuing this line of thought, feminist media scholars have drawn from platform studies,

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which posits that platforms and technologies have their own politics and are capable of shaping power relations by supporting, guiding, and restricting certain user actions (Nakamura 2008; Bucher 2012; Van Dijk and Poell 2013; Stanfill 2015; Plantin 2018). Stanfill explains that platform affordances delineate “what is possible on [web]sites—features, categories of use foregrounded, and how technological features make certain uses easier or harder” (2015, 1061). That is to say, technological features delimit and shape user behavior by making certain actions easier, harder, possible, or impossible within the platform. Interface, software, and hardware affordances all work together to create a platform’s discourse: the “norms of use” (1061) that structure the production of meaning and knowledge. The user is then “configured” by this discourse (Friz and Gehl 2016, 691). Their subject position, actions, logic, and motivations depend on “when and to what technologies say yes” (Stanfill 1060). Platform affordances—the when, where, how and why platforms say yes—can therefore be seen as a form of productive power, which works through the implementation and reinforcement of the platform’s discourse.

Feminist media scholars were quick to point out that the discourses being created through media technologies were not neutral or isolated, but intersected with and maintained other discourses, and therefore often perpetuated traditional power hierarchies (Wajcman 2007; Gillespie 2010; Friz and Gehl 2016; Massanari 2015, 2017; Bivens 2017). In “Pinning the feminine user”, Amanda Friz and Robert Gehl argue that Pinterest’s user tutorial codes and configures users as female through interface protocols that rely on traditional feminine gender scripts. Because the tutorial is mandatory, and certain actions are mandatory to complete the tutorial (users must, for example, create a first pin and select five ‘interests’ from a list of suggestions), Friz and Gehl argue that the “user experiences a ‘body-object articulation’ […] a moment in which he or she is trained […] to achieve the ‘right’ uses of the system” (690). These platform affordances employ traditional feminine gender scripts in their organization of the user’s actions and motivations. They emphasize collaboration, support, collection, and

decoration—traditionally ‘feminine’ characteristics that are often contrasted with a ‘masculine’ emphasis on competition, individualism, and creation (701). By requiring users to enact specific, gendered actions and comply with gendered motivations, the Pinterest tutorial thereby

encourages the materialization of gender scripts in user behavior (686).

At her TEDx Talk at Carleton University, Rena Bivens discusses the seemingly simplistic and unquestioned assumptions that technologies, such as electric razors, make about gender: that

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women like to stay home, and so their razor has a bulky charging dock, whereas men like to be mobile, and so their razor can plug directly into any outlet, for example. Technologies, she argues, are not designed in a social vacuum. Rather, gendered assumptions and scripts are adopted, built into, sustained, and perpetuated by technology (“Why Gender Matters in Social Media”). This is not to say that media technologies lock us all into traditional, oppressive gender scripts and hierarchies, but to insist on the need to be cognizant of the ways they carry with them ideological understandings of gender, and organize their users in gendered ways. Especially considering that media technologies create discourses of productive power (that they say yes, rather than no), feminist media witnessing must embrace the ways that media technologies foreground possibility, rather than restriction.

In her foundational work, “From Women and Technology to Gendered Technoscience,” Judy Wajcman argues that “the gender-technology relationship is fluid and flexible, and that feminist politics and not technology per se is the key to gender equality” (2007, 287). Any practice of feminist media witnessing therefore not only considers how subjects become

gendered, and that gender is made and performed through their interaction with technology, but understands that there is an opportunity to either perpetuate or restructure oppressive gender discourses—to imagines different possibilities for gender through media technologies. For media witnessing, what will be of particular importance will be the specific conditions of witnessing that platform affordances create: what are the possibilities and consequences of bearing witness to sexual assault on specific platforms? What kinds of gendered power relations and what gender discourses do the technological components, interface characteristics, and social contexts of these platforms employ? And how might they enable ethical, equitable modes of witnessing for women and sexual assault survivors?

1.4 Witnessing strategies

The gender framework that has been developed in the previous sections in regards to speech, truth, and media can now be applied to current media witnessing strategies. In the following section, the two primary strategies for classical witnessing are explored, which have been extrapolated from Mortensen’s overview of the history of media witnessing. The first strategy concerns the ‘collective witness’, a framework from the late 1990s and early 2000s that sprung

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from live television broadcast (Mortensen 1397-1398; Ellis, Seeing Things; Peters 2001). The second strategy is from more contemporary scholarship in the late 2000s onwards, which

proposes a framework for the ‘universal witness’ (Mortensen 1398-1400). Both strategies aim to facilitate the transition of individual speech to collective truth, however, neither takes into consideration the gendered obstacles that undergird witnessing practices, and so are insufficient strategies for sexual assault witnessing (Figure 2). These strategies represent gaps in the media witnessing scholarship where feminist media witnessing may enable more equitable modes of reception for women and sexual assault survivors’ testimony.

Figure 2: Insufficiencies of classical witnessing model

1.4.1 Collective witness

The collective witness strategy stems from early analyses of live television broadcast, which was one of the first media to be explored in depth by witnessing scholarship and has laid much of the groundwork for media analysis within the media witnessing tradition (Ellis, Seeing Things; Peters 2001; Frosh 2006; Frosh and Pinchesvki, “Introduction”). Live television broadcast complicated previous notions of witnessing as an individual experience and singular,

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were unfolding as they watched. Witnessing had previously been limited to first hand experience —the so-called ‘hic et nunc’ (here and now)—and so required the witness to be bodily present to the event (Frosh and Pinchesvki, “Media Witnessing” 598). To witness in the flesh was one thing, but could it be said that television audiences could also bear witness? Could witnessing depend solely on simultaneity?

Peters argues that live broadcast expanded the notion of witnessing to include viewers present in time, but not in space, because a certain amount of simultaneity and direct experience was maintained (712). Live broadcast television therefore expanded the possibilities for

witnessing to anyone with a TV, and so ushered in the potential for “collective witnessing” (Mortensen 1397). The individual witness was now indistinguishable from the mass, as their experience was identical throughout; the particulars of bodily experience eschewed for uniform access. The witnessing act no longer needed to move from ‘seeing’ to ‘speaking’ because there was no one left to tell, nothing left to translate. Everyone has witnessed the same thing, at the same time. The individual experience was also the collective truth.

However, this did not make the transition from individual to collective effortless and immediate. Rather, it reaffirmed the veracity gap as a central obstacle for witnessing by

introducing new hierarchies of witnessing: present in time and space (“being there”), present in time but not in space (“live transmission”), present in space but not in time (“historicity”), and present in neither time nor space (“recording”) (Peters 721). For example, to view a recording of speech places the witness in “the profane zone in which the attitude of witnessing is hardest to sustain,” whereas the physical audience of the speech can claim the privileged position of “being there” (Peters 721), adhering to previous standards for the ‘hic et nunc’.

Audiences no longer needed to be physically present in order to witness an event, but these new relations established new hierarchies of witnessing. The authority of the collective witness was weak compared with the physical audience, their claim to the historical record more muted and insecure. Collective witnessing therefore suffered a loss of impact, prestige and authority in order to facilitate the transition from individual to collective. The loss of authority is especially clear in the attempts to redeem the moral responsibility of televised witnessing. As collective witness blurred the lines between individual and collective experience, the moral responsibility that was once the burden of the individual became widespread and diluted. If “(t)o witness an event is to be responsible in some way to it,” (Peters 708) then entire audiences were

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newly implicated in events, and so ethically responsible for what they witnessed (Ellis, Seeing

Things 44). Media scholars proposed several concepts for recovering an ethical account of

televised witnessing, such as mundane witness (Ellis, “Mundane Witness” 73), mismeeting (Bauman 1990), civil inattention, and stranger sociality (Frosh 2006). Paul Frosh, in one such attempt, argues that non-commitment “creates a social space of uncommitted observation and impersonal witnessing in which people are sufficiently the same […] for each person to be able to imagine what it might be like to be in another’s shoes” (2006, 284). His argument proposes that viewers do not even care enough to pre-judge others, and so receive their accounts easily and without resistance, thus priming audiences for “civil equivalence” (Frosh 284) and moral clarity.

However, indifference does not breed equality, and certainly does not cultivate authority. In cases of sexual assault, one only need ask whose shoes we are more willing to step into to understand that certain positions are more readily “imaginable” (Frosh 284) than others, and are positioned closer to truth and authority. As a whole, media scholars acknowledge that the ethical implication of live television witnessing is vague and the exact responsibilities of the viewers unclear. The ease of flipping through channels full of witness-able terrors and atrocities and the television format of oscillating between shocking content and mundane advertisements made witnessing a commonplace experience: a dull drone whose vibrato was quickly lost in the daily hum. Collective witnessing is limited in its authority and its capacity to cultivate processes of validation and to enact response. Without processes of validation, the record stands as it was transmitted, leaving witnesses without a further role, unable to seek out and establish legitimacy, to act on or grasp their own moral responsibility (Frosh 289). Events no longer need

corroboration or testimony in order to be taken as collective truth, but collective truth now significantly lacks the ability or legitimacy to motivate response. It is, as Ellis writes, a “powerless knowledge” (Seeing Things 1).

Collective witnessing does facilitate the transition from individual to collective, however, at the cost of cultivating moral authority or legitimacy for the individual. Witnesses lose their prestigious position, and remain uncertain of their moral responsibility towards the event (Ellis,

Seeing Things 1; Frosh 289). The collective witness does not move beyond passive ‘seeing’ to

active ‘saying’ (Peters 709), and remains firmly anchored in silent knowledge, unsure of how to testify to what they had seen. It is emblematic of this trade-off between collectivity and authority that the motto of the television audience became “we cannot say that we do not know” (Ellis,

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Seeing Things 1). The witness does not affect the historical record. They do not lay the grounds

for a vision of a new world. In attempting to traverse the veracity gap, collective witnessing sacrifices the specificity, authority and responsibility of the individual, meaning that power structures that are built from social hierarchies are neglected and overlooked: everyone becomes ‘sufficiently the same’ in their witness, as in their silence.

1.4.2 Universal witness

The second strategy that this work explores arises from more contemporary analyses of citizen journalism and concerns the ‘universal witness’ (Reading 2009; Chouliaraki 2010; Allan 2013; Pantti 2013; Mortensen 2015). In these conceptions, the universal witness is represented by the citizen-journalist or citizen-photographer, whose testimony and images are easily dispersed, received, and widely applicable, but who maintains their individual position. These witnesses are easy to relate to, and so translate seamlessly into collective accounts because they could have been “anyone” (Pantti 2013, 210). Inextricably linked to newly widespread and accessible mobile recording technologies, the universal witness is relatable because ‘anyone’ can now record and disseminate their own experience of an event (Allan 2007; Frosh and Pinchevski, “Introduction”; Chouliaraki 2010; Andén-Papadopoulos 2014; Rentschler 2014). The citizen-photographer stands in for the distant viewer, but also represents a collective account, as indicated by Mervi Pantti: “the photographer in citizen images emerges as an embodied collectivity, as a figure inviting herself to be imagined as ‘anyone’” (210). In her use of the feminine pronoun, Pantti indicates that citizen journalism is one realm where gender does not prevent a woman from embodying or producing a collective account. And yet, women and survivors still encounter barriers towards this kind of generalization in cases of sexual assault. Coming forward as a survivor restricts the witnessing agent through gendered narratives and discourse, preventing them from representing the universal collective and discarding their testimony as illegitimate.

Contemporary media witnessing scholars argue that new media technologies have eliminated the “distance from the seen to the said” and from the individual to the collective “by transforming witnessing into a participatory and self-reflexive act” (Mortensen 1398). Kari Andén-Papadopoulos uses the term “mediated mass self-communication” (2014, 753) to indicate an emphasis on the individual in a new, connected environment that offers “autonomy,

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horizontal networking, interactivity, and the recombination of content under the initiative of the individual” (Mortensen 1399). The figure of the citizen-journalist as universal witness is enabled by the mass dissemination of recording technologies, foregrounding equal access in

disseminating material to the public sphere. However, media technologies do not guarantee equal access to public discourse in all arenas of witnessing. Indeed, the term ‘public’ itself is

problematic, as publics have always been fragmented and exclusionary on the basis on sex, race, class, and other social relations (Fraser 1990, 60). Nancy Fraser has critiqued Jürgen Habermas’ classical definition of the public sphere as a “masculinist ideological notion” (62), where

omitting social relations from the realm of political participation—thought to be a universalizing move that guaranteed equal access to political discourse—“functioned informally to marginalize women and members of the plebian classes and to prevent them from participating as peers,” (63). This reading further complicates Peters’ primary dilemma that “Only words are public” (711): speech itself becomes a problem of access.

Sexual assault survivors encounter a twofold challenge in their attempt to bear witness: to translate their experience into public discourse and to access public discourse in the first place. This obstacle to witnessing is nowhere clearer in terms of gender than in the 79% of survivors who did not report their sexual assault in 2016 (RAINN, "The Criminal Justice System"). Indeed, the winnowing that occurs at each stage of a rape prosecution demonstrates equal difficulty in speaking out as being heard or believed once one has spoken: 23% of rapes are reported (23% of survivors are able to speak about their rape in a public context). Of those, 20% lead to arrest (20% of survivors who do speak in public about their rape are believed by police). Of the arrests, 19% will lead to prosecution (19% of survivors who are believed by police are believed by a jury) (RAINN, "The Criminal Justice System"). Keeping this in mind, Peters’ argument that witnessing “has two faces: the passive one of seeing and the active one of saying” (709)

demonstrates that the very conception of witnessing is problematic for survivors, whose speech is prevented before it is realized. These survivors cannot bear witness because they cannot access public speech, let alone face the veracity gap of communication that accompanies reception.

Universalizing the witnessing agent, like universalizing the public citizen and the struggles they encounter in accessing public discourse, serves to obscure the multiple forms of oppression and obstacles they face while attempting to bear witness, let alone those they face in being taken at their word. The citizen-journalist is understood to have universal access to

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distribution technologies; their ability to produce and publish their witness is implicit (Andén-Papadopoulos 755). The same is not true for the sexual assault witness, whose ability to produce testimony is compromised: a problem of access as much as a problem of veracity. The veracity gap is fundamentally misplaced if it is only invoked after the witness has spoken, between individual speech and collective truth.

The universal strategy does not consider the ways that sexual assault collectives are prevented through individualization (Biressi 6), a tactic that defines the sexual assault witness against a mythic ‘ideal victim’ (Randall 397), and finds her wanting, insufficient, and negligible. The figure of the universal sexual assault witness has already been established, and it is not just ‘anyone’, but an exhaustive set of standards. These standards exclude witnesses based on their subject positions within gender, race, and class hierarchies, and so pre-emptively qualify the ‘universal’ witness. When even witnesses such as Ford, who meet all impossible criteria (Edwards 2018), fail to be validated, this ideal is shown to be false: there is no legitimate survivor, no valid witness to sexual assault.

1.5 Towards Feminist Media Witnessing

Neither the collective nor the universal strategy is appropriate for a model of feminist media witnessing. The universal strategy does not account for the ways that women’s witness and speech are always already positioned as both individual and illegitimate. Taken one by one, testimonies are discarded as singular instances or tragic accidents (Biressi 6), and cannot achieve the authority or legitimacy of the mythical ‘ideal witness’ (Randall 397). Collective witnessing through live television broadcast leaves individuals stranded and isolated from one another and provides little clarity in regards to their moral responsibility towards the event, lowering the impact and significant of testimony. It sacrifices authority for universal and uniform access, capping the witness’ legitimacy and potential to motivate response. More recent media technologies have connected the isolated collective, however they still fail to invoke a

framework of authority (Mortensen 1395), and so leave women’s witness without processes of validation and unable to be vindicated, claim legitimacy, or inform the historical record.

Biressi writes that “Coming to voice in the public sphere without coming into power is therefore deeply problematic when it comes to confronting the injustices faced by women in

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general and by women of color especially” (12). By discounting gender, classical witnessing strategies ignore and perpetuate the processes by which women’s witness has been historically disqualified, derided, and made powerless. They demonstrate how media witnessing theory, without feminist intervention, has continued to universalize the problem of bearing witness. By including gender, the specific obstacles that survivors face in their attempts to bear witness to sexual assault can be identified and compensated for. If survivors are prevented from becoming ‘universal’ witnesses because their subject position is discarded for being (gendered) illegitimate before they even speak, how might feminist media witnessing practices work to validate their subject position? And if witnessing collectives are prevented from achieving authority because they are either isolated from each other or disconnected from claims to legitimacy, how might feminist media witnessing facilitate the creation of a connected collective that sustains its claims to truth and validity? Women and survivors face unfair and often insurmountable barriers to witnessing. They are met with distrust, incredulity, and disregard when they attempt to communicate their experiences and suffering. What this work demands to know is: how can digital media open new pathways for believing them?

Chapter Two:

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The problem of witnessing is one of truth and belief, entangled deeply with questions of identity. It not only refers to the complexities of being there, but of being, and of relating that being to others who are neither there, nor you. Witnessing occurs at “the difficult juncture between experience and discourse” (Peters 710), where private experience becomes public utterance, and ‘I was there’ becomes ‘this is what happened’. To witness is to translate being into social truth. In this way, unsurprisingly, the problem of bearing witness is a deeply gendered one. It begins not at the moment being witnessed, but with the witness themselves, and so cannot help but invoke the confluence of social, historical, and technological discourses that work to define and often prevent the witnessing agent. If witnessing continues to invoke prestige and moral

authority, and grant control of historical records and public understanding, it must position witnessing subjects equitably in relation to truth and authority. It must account for their positions within social hierarchies and power structures, such as gender. This paper proposes a theory of ‘feminist media witnessing’ in order to guide the conceptualization and establishment of such equitable witnessing practices.

Feminist media witnessing represents strategies of enacting and receiving sexual assault survivors’ testimonies that interrupt and circumvent the processes by which these testimonies are devalued, discredited, isolated, and made powerless. These strategies account for the ways in which gendered discourses of truth and speech are maintained and perpetuated in the confluence of media representation, technologies, and witnessing theories in regards to sexual assault. Feminist media witnessing occurs when women and survivors’ witness have been received without being hindered, discarded, disparaged, or otherwise inequitably treated because of the gendered position of the speaker.

In the previous section, the current condition of women’s witness in regards to media witnessing theory was established, and the gaps in the literature where gender has been neglected have been identified. Two primary issues have arisen. First is the assumption of the universal witness: that witnesses begin from an authoritative and relatable position, and so are capable of transcending their individual, subjective speaking positions. Second is the problem of the witnessing collective, which is disconnected from frameworks of authority. These assumptions underpin what are referred to from here onwards as inequitable witnessing practices, and they provide the direction and starting point for feminist media witnessing. This paper proposes that feminist media witnessing can be defined in terms of two responding strategies, which target the

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insufficiencies of the classical witnessing model. These strategies can be deployed as structuring guidelines for bearing witness to sexual assault survivors in equitable ways.

2.1 Validating witness

The first strategy for enacting and establishing equitable witnessing responds to the ways women’s witness is often precluded from authority or legitimacy in matters of sexual assault based on their gendered subject position: feminist media witnessing works to validate women’s

witness. This strategy concerns itself with the transition from speech to truth, the gendered

barriers to the ‘speaking’ stage of witnessing, and the consideration and evaluation of individual testimonies. The universal witnessing strategy neglects the ways that women’s witness arrives pre-judged because of her subject position within gendered discourses. Instead, this strategy for feminist media witnessing begins from the understanding that women faces additional barriers to validation and universality in sexual assault witnessing, which prevent their individual testimony from obtaining moral authority or representing a collective account. It additionally considers the ways their speech is prevented, and becomes a problem of access over one of validity. It

therefore proposes that digital media might enable or afford women’s witness equal visibility and validation to that of the universal witness. In validating their witness, feminist media witnessing

portrays women’s witness as true, rejects interpellating or configuring audiences as skeptics,

and portrays speech itself as evidence and grounds for legitimacy.

It may be difficult to adopt a strategy of witnessing that begins from acceptance,

especially considering, as Peters has, that witnessing has always been a heavily suspect, policed and regulated linguistic territory (711). However, to begin from any other position—even neutrality—would be to artificially diminish women’s claims to truth by discounting the gendered hierarchies that construct witnessing discourses and practice. This first strategy therefore begins from acceptance of individual testimony, and works to position—rather than prove—the testimony as valid and legitimate.

How to Believe Women: Towards a model of Feminist Media Witnessing