Epistemic Uncertainties: Contemporary Narratives of Sexual and Gender-Based Violence 807 views

“Epistemic Uncertainties” argues for the value of uncertainty to feminist theory as a way of acknowledging the complexities of sexual and gender-based violence. Uncertainty is a potentially dangerous mode for survivors. In response, US anti-rape activism has advocated for the reception of survivor testimony as credible and authoritative, in part laboring to develop what I call a rhetoric of certainty. While fiction, by virtue of being fiction, has different material stakes in comparison to a testimony that is given before the US Senate Judiciary Committee, or, for that matter, a public tweet, it too participates in discourses surrounding sexual and gender-based violence. The works of contemporary fiction discussed in this project frame key points of tension within these debates about survivor speech, reimagining them through the vicissitudes of first-person narration. These key points of tension, I argue, all crystallize around the problems of speaking about (and with) uncertainty: survivor precarity in Kate Walbert’s His Favorites (Chapter One); female desire and sexual agency in Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch” (Chapter Two); the apology of the accused man in David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (Chapter Three); and the specter of untruth in Jia Tolentino’s “We Come from Old Virginia,” an essay about sexual assault at my home institution, the University of Virginia (Coda). In a #MeToo era in which stories of sexual and gender-based violence have received unprecedented mainstream media exposure, I contend that we can treat the testimonies of survivors as credible and authoritative, and open up discursive space for their expressions of uncertainty.

PHD (Doctor of Philosophy)

Contemporary Literature; American Literature; Sexual violence; Feminist theory; Narrative; Testimony; #MeToo

Elements of this dissertation's second chapter is published in Feminist Theory. See Wallace, Samantha. "In defense of not-knowing: uncertainty and contemporary narratives of sexual violence" (2021) https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700120987387.

English

2021-05-14