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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The #MeToo movement created more opportunities for women to speak up about sexual assault. But we are also living in a time when "fake news" and "alternative facts" call into question the very nature of truth. This troubling paradox is at the heart of this compelling book. The convergence of #MeToo and the crisis of post-truth is used to explore the experiences of women and people of color whose claims around issues of sexual violence are often held in doubt. Banet-Weiser and Higgins investigate how the gendered and racialized logics of "believability" are defined and contested within media culture, proposing that a mediated "economy of believability" is the context in which public bids for truth about sexual violence are made, negotiated, and authorized today.
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Seitenzahl: 388
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction: (Post-)Truth, Belief, Media, and Sexual Violence
Believability
Our conjuncture: Media and the (post-)truth of sexual violence
A “crisis” of post-truth
Doubtful subjects
An economy of believability
Notes
1 Construction: #MeToo Media and Representations of Believability
#MeToo media
Disclosure: Social media campaigns against sexual violence
Nondisclosure: #MeToo investigative journalism
Futility and fictions: The labors of believability
(Re)constructing the believable subject
2 Commodification: Buying and Selling Belief in the #MeToo Marketplace
Developing a market
Feminist marketplaces
Historicizing the #MeToo market
Commodifying disbelief: Technologies of prevention, surveillance, and evidence
An app for that
Wearable tech
The cost of becoming believable
Notes
3 Contest: Media, “Mob Justice,” and the Digitization of Doubt
Who’s afraid of trial by media?
Beware the mob
The digitization of doubt
Visibility and ease of circulation
New forms and functions of evidence
Digital platforms and the “platformization of truth”
Who
should
be afraid of trial by media?
Notes
4 Conditional: Kavanaughs, Karens, and the Struggle for Victimhood
He said/she said
On “feeling” believable
A life ruined?
Witch hunts and hysteria
When conditions collide
Conditions of care
Conclusion
Notes
Conclusion: #BelieveWomen, Revisited
Is another post-truth possible?
Media and believability
Notes
Acknowledgments
From Sarah
From Kat
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Believability
Sexual Violence, Media, and the Politics of Doubt
SARAH BANET-WEISER
KATHRYN CLAIRE HIGGINS
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kathryn Claire Higgins 2023
The right of Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kathryn Claire Higgins to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5381-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5382-2(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022947053
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Introduction: (Post-)Truth, Belief, Media, and Sexual Violence
On May 22, 2022, a jury in the US state of Virginia found Amber Heard liable for defaming her ex-husband Johnny Depp. During the trial, Heard’s lawyers presented copious evidence to support her claim that she was a victim of abuse (including sexual assault), ranging from photos of the injuries she sustained, text messages, witnesses’ statements, and audio and video recordings. Despite this, the jury ultimately concluded that she was the one who had inflicted harm. This harm took the form of four short sentences, written by Heard, none mentioning Depp by name. “I spoke up against sexual violence – and faced our culture’s wrath. That has to change.” “Then two years ago, I became a public figure representing domestic abuse, and I felt the full force of our culture’s wrath for women who speak out.” And finally, “I had the rare vantage point of seeing, in real time, how institutions protect men accused of abuse.”
These sentences, determined by the Virginia jury to be defamatory against Depp, could be ironically repurposed as accurate descriptions of what happened to Heard during and after the trial. The US legal system protected Depp, a man accused of abuse; Heard was delivered the “full force of our culture’s wrath” (Heard, 2018, para. 3). The onslaught of misogynistic abuse and violence directed at Heard by Depp supporters and fans was, even in a context where misogyny has been practically normalized, astonishing. Almost all social media outlets, from Facebook to Twitter to Instagram to TikTok, were flooded with content accusing Heard of being a liar. YouTubers and Twitch users reacted to the trial in real time, creating images and memes attacking Heard and dissecting her presented evidence for signs of fabrication. Right-wing political pundit Ben Shapiro spent $50,000 in ads on his show proclaiming that Heard was deceptive and dishonest.
And even though the backlash triggered by the trial was proving the veracity of those four sentences in real time, the jury ultimately agreed with Depp and his supporters. Their problem, however, was not that Heard lacked evidence, but rather that she failed to perform a victimhood that was emotionally convincing: “She would answer one question and be crying and then two seconds later she would turn ice cold,” observed one juror. “It didn’t seem natural” (Tapp, 2022, para. 1). While the violence and misogyny directed at Heard varied somewhat, ranging from attacks on her character, physical appearance, ostensible promiscuity, and so on, all the tweets, memes, texts, and videos clearly connected with this central theme: Amber Heard simply wasn’t believable.
The Depp/Heard trial took place a little over five years after Alyssa Milano tweeted out: “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.” Of course, the #MeToo movement was not originated by Hollywood celebrities in 2017, but rather was founded in 2006 by activist Tarana Burke. Burke coined the phrase as a way for Black women and girls to share their stories of sexual abuse and trauma (see Jefferson, 2018). The viral social media movement precipitated by Milano’s tweet repurposed the phrase to spotlight (in the first instance) sexual abuses in Hollywood against (primarily) white, cisgender women actors. By doing so, it imbued the issues of sexual harassment and violence with a new spectacular global visibility, while problematically also further marginalizing the stories of those most systemically vulnerable to sexual harms: especially, racialized women, incarcerated women, women living in poverty, queer and transgender people, and sex workers. Our focus in this book is primarily on the cultural aftermath of the later, viral internet iteration of the movement – which we designate here as #MeToo.
In 2017, after Milano’s tweet, the #MeToo movement emerged with spectacular visibility on global social media platforms. To many, it seemed like that there was a paradigm shift in the making: after decades of normative workplace sexual harassment and assault, men who abused power and position would finally be held to account. From the high-profile downfall of media giants like Harvey Weinstein to the public mobilizations of outrage and compassion for victims of sexual harassment and abuse, a reckoning appeared to be upon us, and a new feminist consciousness seemed to be on the rise. Relatedly, the explosive visibility of women who accused men of harassment and assault implied a possible new redistribution of the “benefit of the doubt” as it relates to sexual violence, away from powerful men and toward those over whom they wield social and economic power. Yet, this historical moment coincided with another: one marked by discourses of “fake news” and “alternative facts” and characterized by growing anxiety about the status of truth in public culture. Reflecting this double movement, “feminism” was named Word of the Year by Merriam Webster in 2017, newly amplified by #MeToo, while just one year earlier, the 2016 Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year was “post-truth.”
The overlap and connections between these two cultural and political phenomena – the “crisis” of post-truth on the one hand, and the #MeToo moment on the other – is not often commented upon. However, in Believability we approach their co-emergence as deeply significant. This book takes up believability as a lens through which to offer a feminist rethinking of the post-truth predicament. We turn to the cultural aftermath of the #MeToo movement as a conjuncture in which the (un)believability of women’s speech has become an object of cultural fascination, contention, and anxiety.1 More specifically, we consider how the framing concern of both #MeToo and the perceived crisis of post-truth – that is, the fraught entanglement of truth and belief – is conditioned by believability as a gendered and racialized logic. We thus center the experiences of women and people of color to disturb dominant narratives of the post-truth moment, which tend to position the elements of post-truth – misinformation, “fake news,” and so on – as newly corruptive forces in democratic life, and thus as newly disruptive to the pursuit of both truth and justice.
Instead, we argue that a mediated economy of believability is the context in which public bids for truth are made, evaluated, and authorized. As we detail later in this Introduction, the economy of believability designates a terrain of political struggle where one’s capacity to “speak truthfully” – that is, to speak in a way that can be culturally recognized as truthful – is publicly negotiated through a combination of subjective resources (i.e., who one is) and performative labors (i.e., what one does). Importantly, we define the subjective not as personal relativism, but rather as what Donna Haraway (1988) calls “situated knowledges” or what Judith Butler (1995) has termed “contingent”: those culturally mediated dynamics and everyday practices that position us as particular subjects and that rely on particular historical foundations. Similarly, performance here should not be understood in terms of artifice or deception, but rather in terms of construction: as a core element of what coheres subjects and situates them in relation to one another. Believability, we argue, is situated in just this way, and media culture is (and has always been) what helps situate it.
Like most economies, an economy of believability involves representations, ideologies, labor, products, resources – and intersecting power hierarchies within all of these elements. And, while the question of who we believe and why when it comes to sexual violence has always been a political one, the economy of believability that we explicate here exists in a very specific historical conjuncture: one in which media – especially, digital media – are now the primary site for the negotiation of “believable” evidence and the performance of “believable” subjecthood. This highly mediated economy has a broader reach and accessibility; it is dynamic and networked; it also has expanded spaces of backlash. Believability analyzes this economy as one in which powerful white men have historically wielded disproportionate influence, and so one that continues to be deeply structured by gender and race. As a mediated economy, it is also, we propose, an important space of contingency and disruption, where the politics of (un)believability can be reworked and remade but where the commercialized logics of visibility that frame media platforms and products nonetheless continue to put pressure on this transformative potential.
Additionally, since at least the early 2000s – and amplified by Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States in 2016 – we have witnessed what has been called a “crisis” of post-truth (Harsin, 2018). Who, and what, was considered “post-truth” differed depending on where one falls on the political spectrum, though it has been associated with Trump’s untruthful campaign promises and his camp arguing for “alternative facts.” Democrats and liberals lamented the ways conservative media outlets like Fox News reported Trump’s lies as if they were true. Journalists found their own truths questioned by citizens from all political parties. Conservative groups in the US held protests with signs stating “Trump 4 Truth” and “Fake News.” Some blamed academics for the crisis, who posited theories of poststructuralism and postmodernism that question whether there is “Truth” with a capital “T,” insisting rather on multiple, often contradictory, truths.
Dominant narratives of the post-truth moment have so far widely neglected closer consideration of how the very notion of “truth” (which we are now ostensibly “post”) has been historically shaped by the experiences and expectations of the powerful. As we see in the ideologies of the Enlightenment, the twinned epistemological pillars of “objectivity” and “rationality” that hold up the concept of truth in Western culture have disproportionately authorized men – specifically, white men from the West – to produce philosophical and scientific knowledge of the world and circulate it as fact (Haraway, 1988). Believability places the contemporary post-truth moment within this history not to deny it as socially problematic, but to better understand what kind of problem it is and for whom. Our aim is to sketch a more detailed portrait of its historical novelties and continuities in order to more clearly articulate (post-)truth as a frame of believability, and thereby an effect of social and economic power. As we detail across this book, the condition of being “outside” the possibility of truthful speech and “outside” the shared truths that cohere political communities is new only for some: specifically, for those privileged by gender, race, and wealth, who have been historically authorized as truth-tellers. Meanwhile, people from marginalized groups, such as women, queer people, and people of color of all genders, have historically been routinely positioned as unbelievable, untrustworthy, doubtful subjects – as subjective subjects par excellence whose truths will always remain not just unconfirmed, but unconfirmable. The historical overlap between the #MeToo movement and public anxieties about something called post-truth puts this historical clash into bold relief, and raises important questions about the significance of media to its emerging politics.
As we discuss later in this Introduction, it is primarily legal discourses about truth, evidence, and credibility that have framed both public understandings of sexual violence and popular discourses about #MeToo as a cultural intervention. Similarly, the question of who is believed and why within institutions of legal truth-seeking as they relate to sexual violence – especially, in police investigations and criminal trials – is an established area of scholarly interest. Feminist legal scholars, for example, have long critiqued “credibility” as a gendered and racialized construct with significant sway over the outcome of criminal trials – that is, over verdict-as-truth. Believability adds to these conversations by taking a slightly different direction: by shifting the lens from credibility to believability, and so from truth as a matter of honesty and/or accuracy to truth as a matter of cultural construction. While the question of who is perceived as credible and with what consequences for so-called criminal justice is undeniably an important one, the narrative we offer here refocuses on culture as a way of decentering the state as the ultimate “decider” of believability. Criminal justice responses are profoundly limited in their ability to address the causes and conditions of sexual violence, and the overwhelming majority of instances of rape and sexual assault are never even reported to the police, let alone prosecuted in a court of law.2 Shifting focus from the sphere of law to the sphere of culture, as we do here, similarly redirects critical attention toward the “truths” of sexual violence not as they exist a priori as nonpolitical “fact,” but as they emerge through complex negotiations of visibility, recognition, and care in which power plays a central role (see Gay, 2018). While legal institutions continue to fail women and other marginalized subjects, these cultural negotiations are fundamentally open, unstable, and, ultimately, transformable for social justice. Believability, in other words, is something that we make, and something we can make differently.
This is, of course, by no means the first book to interrogate the new visibility of sexual violence in the aftermath of #MeToo and its cultural and political implications. Scores of scholarly and trade books and hundreds of articles have been written about #MeToo’s mainstreaming of popular (white) feminism and the groundswell of public awareness about (some) sexual violence. These include academic titles like Karen Boyle’s #MeToo, Weinstein and Feminism (2019), Meenakshi Gigi Durham’s MeToo: The Impact of Rape Culture in the Media (2021), Alison Phipps’s Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism (2020), as well as highly successful books for a wider audience like Koa Beck’s White Feminism (2021), Anita Hill’s Believing (2021), and Jessica Valenti and Jaclyn Friedman’s anthology Believe Me: How Trusting Women Can Change the World (2020), to name just a few titles. Books by feminist philosophers, such as Kate Manne’s Down Girl (2017) and Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex (2021), became cross-over best-sellers. Importantly, there have been critiques not only of the Western-centrism of the #MeToo movement but also the Western focus of the scholarship on #MeToo. Scholars such as Srila Roy (2022a, 2022b), Jinsook Kim (2021), Maria Pia Lopez (2020), Simidele Dosekun (2020), and others have incisively theorized feminisms outside both Western contexts and Western feminist movements. Such critiques have thoroughly unpacked the politics of #MeToo, and also movements including #NiUnaMenos in Latin America, #WoYeShi in China, and #MeTooIndia in India. In this book, we rely primarily on Western empirical examples and the Western #MeToo movement.3
While undeniably in conversation with these works, Believability is not, at its core, a book about the #MeToo movement. Rather, it is a book about how the economy of believability as it relates to accusations of sexual violence is functioning in a very specific Western historical conjuncture. This conjuncture is shaped by #MeToo, undeniably, but more broadly by media as the contexts in which public accusations of sexual harms are increasingly made, evaluated, and endorsed as “believable” (or not). Mediation is, of course, not the only element of importance to the conjuncture we analyze here – it includes, too, white nationalism, nativism, and the global creep of far right populism, as well as popular feminism, popular misogyny, and “progressive” neoliberalism. However, it is an essential yet often overlooked element, we argue, precisely because of its deep significance to the two dimensions of believability as we have conceptualized it: subjectivity and performance. On the one hand, media have always carried obvious importance for the (re)production of racialized and gendered subjectivities, and so for the open question of who is to be understood as believable and why. The more pronounced historical shift that we document here, however, is the ways in which the second, performative dimension of believability – that is, the work of becoming believable, or believability as labor – is increasingly located in media platforms and products, and so increasingly refracted through their logics.
Believability is by no means the first work to suggest that “post-truth” is far less historically novel than it first appears – truth has always been a contested and political category, and manipulations and disavowals of truth are long-established techniques of power (Harsin, 2018). Less commonly encountered, however, are critiques that position post-truth as a historical continuity in terms of its social politics – that is, in terms of who it affects and how. This is precisely what we endeavor to do here, and precisely where refocusing on the questions of doubt and believability has utility. By asking “post-truth for whom?” (Mejia et al., 2018) we foreground an associated set of questions. Who and what is now doubted that used to be easily believed? Who and what has always been doubted, and why? And how does doubt move, when it moves at all? Mainstream critiques predominantly frame post-truth as intensely and indiscriminately threatening to democracy and justice. But it can also be understood as challenging those who have been historically authorized to speak (and so, make) the “truth.” It is this ambivalence that we see negotiated in a broad media context.
Believability
First, though, a few words about how we are defining believability in this book. There are many different terms used to describe women in cases of sexual violence that overlap with or are adjacent to believability: liar, untrustworthy, not credible, insignificant, manipulative, dishonest, doubtful, fake. These concepts clearly inform the concept of believability; however, we feel believability has a particular valence in the contemporary moment. Believability has two main meanings: it is the capability of being believed, and it is the quality of being convincing. It is thus both about one’s subjectivity – believe me because of who I am – and about one’s performance – how convincing are you in a particular bid for “truth”? Both definitions, but especially the latter, also call into question the believability of sexual violence itself: was this event actually violent or harmful? Or is she just a “scorned woman” or “gold-digger,” trying to get revenge, hoping to take down a powerful man? Violence is often dismissed through affirming dominant masculine behavior as “natural” and/or historically unproblematic, thus placing even more doubt on women when they accuse men.
These two definitions of believability – subjectivity and performance – overlap in the context of sexual violence and in mediated systems of representation. As we detail throughout this book, we find that media productions often prioritize one element of believability over the other. For example, in many of the popular media productions aired since the 2017 #MeToo movement, the logic of believability is about performance and whether a woman is convincing in her victimhood. Yet, in our discussion of anti-sexual violence products (such as apps and wearable tech), believability is more centered on subjectivity; women’s voices are not believable on their own, so technologies are needed to mitigate their doubtfulness. Again, we feel the twinned poles of believability – subjectivity and performance – are represented and enacted within media culture. Subjectivity and performance of course overlap and inform each other; often one’s subjectivity as a victim of sexual violence depends on how well victimhood is performed, while the extent to which performances of believability are demanded in the first place often hinges on one’s subjective positioning as either “believable” or not. To return to the opening example of Amber Heard, the vitriolic misogyny directed at her (largely through media culture) often focused on her performance: she was not a “perfect” victim, she also lashed out at Depp, she too was angry and not submissive, her tears seemed tactful and contrived. Therefore, Depp supporters positioned her as the abuser and Depp as the victim. Her performance thus constituted her subjectivity: she is constructed as a liar and abuser. But, in replicating sexist and misogynistic tropes of womanhood, the backlash against Heard also illustrated how performance is evaluated through the (gendered, racialized, and classed) lens of subjectivity – Depp’s performances simply weren’t subjected to the same scrutiny as those of Heard. Media culture is thus a space for both possibility and retrenchment, a space where subjectivity is shaped and believability must be performed.
By introducing the analytic of an “economy of believability,” we hope to contribute to both scholarly and popular debates about the cultural legacy of the #MeToo movement and the implications of mediated visibility for feminist liberation. Specifically, we argue that the historical constructions of woman as particular (and thus overly subjective) and woman as dishonest (and thus not trustworthy) are the backdrop against which the spectacular visibility of the #MeToo movement has emerged, and thus are important symbolic forces conditioning how, and to what extent, the movement can contribute to meaningful and enduring political change, especially as it relates to the broader believability of sexual violence.
In the remainder of this Introduction, we offer a theoretical framing of the contemporary conjuncture that informs our understanding of believability. We propose this conjuncture has three critical elements: the “crisis” of post-truth, the historical construction of doubtful subjects, and a mediated economy of believability that is reconfigured by the rise of popular feminism.
Our conjuncture: Media and the (post-)truth of sexual violence
This book maps a historical conjuncture in which the problem of “believability” is taking on new complexities and (potentially) new political implications. Clearly, our analysis takes inspiration from a long lineage of feminist scholarship that has centered the question of subjectivity, particularly personal experience, in public struggles over truth – and, especially, over the truths of sexual violence and harms. Believability also makes an important departure. Rather than explicating the various ways that believability is gendered, racialized, and classed, we explore a specific set of historical conditions that form the context for struggles over believability (and so, struggles over truth) in the contemporary moment. Our focus, in other words, is not on how subjectivity “determines” believability, but, rather, on the specific historical conditions (cultural, economic, technological, etc.) under which the believability of different subjects is currently being (re-)negotiated.
Stuart Hall describes conjunctures as contingent moments of social crisis that emerge through, and can therefore reveal, articulations of economic, cultural, political, and ideological forces in particular historical periods (see Hall et al., 1978). “Thinking conjuncturally” (Clarke, 2014) means taking up points of contradiction and tension as portals through which to investigate how these various forms of power are compounding and delimiting conditions of possibility for social change. It places the political, the economic, the cultural, and the social dynamics of power in essential relationships with one another. Rather than analyzing any one realm as a discrete formation, we propose that believability intersects and overlaps with all of them, and that they all shape and influence one another in important ways (Littler and McRobbie, 2021).
More specifically, to think conjuncturally about believability and sexual violence, we locate contemporary struggles over the “facts” of such violence within a historical moment in which the question of if, when, and how women ought to be believed when they speak publicly about their own lives has become a heated topic of debate. Of course, this is a conjuncture marked by long-enduring imbalances of power and resources along lines of race, gender, and class that have historically positioned women and other marginalized actors as inherently “doubtful” subjects. However, here we propose that it is also a conjuncture framed by other conditions as well, including the new hypermediation of public truth struggles, especially online; and growing anxieties about the unstable status of “facts” in public life, captured by proliferating discourses of “post-truth.” Each of these interconnected developments foregrounds the role of media in contemporary struggles over believability, and so the critical significance of mediation for the politics of doubt as it relates to sexual violence.
Positioning media culture as the primary terrain where definitions of sexual violence are negotiated and struggled over means that we also understand media culture as a potentially fruitful site to challenge structures of misogyny and racism. Media, as decades of scholarship have persuasively argued, provide a central cultural space for representation, recognition, narratives, and ideology. But this is about more than the transmission of ideas, as Angela McRobbie (2005), James Carey (2008), and Stuart Hall et al. (1978) (among others) remind us. Indeed, what cultural studies emphasizes is that culture, political and popular, is, in Hall’s oft-cited words, “a terrain of struggle,” including struggles over meaning, visibility, recognition, and resources. Culture makes us, but we also make it (Williams, 1989). We witness this struggle over meaning and materiality across all media, from magazines (McRobbie, 2000; Harris, 2004; Driscoll, 2002) to television and film (Spigel, 2013; Tasker and Negra, 2007; Brunsdon, 2000; Everett, 2001; Warner, 2015; and others), from social and digital media (Jackson et al., 2020; Duffy, 2022; Sobande, 2020; Steele, 2021; Bailey, 2021; Banet-Weiser, 2018; and others) to networked technologies (Noble, 2018; Benjamin, 2019; Brock, 2020; Browne, 2015; Banet-Weiser and Miltner, 2015; and others) and beyond. And, media culture is about materiality, including labor, production, and resources. The media and cultural industries are also part of this broad context (Cunningham and Craig, 2021; Hesmondhalgh, 2019; Saha, 2017; Durham, 2021); indeed, as Durham (2021) has importantly argued, the 2017 version of #MeToo initially indicted the Hollywood media industries as a key space for sexual violence. And of course, most media platforms in the West are corporately owned (by a small pool of extremely powerful media companies) and ultimately profit-driven, which shapes and limits what we as audiences see, feel, and hear in important ways (Winch and Little, 2021).4 In this book, we place the question of believability within a specific historical conjuncture where mediation is key, and argue that subjective believability and the performance of believability are struggled over in multiple media contexts.
The concept of conjuncture is a particularly productive way to think through what the heightened visibility of narratives, representations, products, and protests that focus on sexual violence might mean for challenging structural misogyny and racism. Rather than analyze discrete media artifacts for how they represent sexual violence, in this book we think of media artifacts as relational through culture – as interconnected parts of a broader historical conjuncture that, even when seemingly unrelated and/or dissimilar, nonetheless have shared cultural, political, and economic conditions of possibility. This broader conjuncture is conditioned by both histories and current struggles over who the “doubtful subject” is, the “crisis” of post-truth, and the spectacular capitalist visibility of networked media and social movements like #MeToo. Thus, the media artifacts we discuss in this book are not meant to be exhaustive but, rather, illustrative of broader issues about gender, sexual violence, and believability. Our argument is that the co-emergence of these media artifacts within a very short period of time is analytically significant and politically revealing. We position believability, and its twinned poles of subjectivity and performance, as a powerful expression of the ways in which all media (even, or perhaps especially, nonfiction media that purport to represent “reality”) are selectively constructed and circulated.
Of course, positioning culture as the dynamic terrain on which discourses of sexual violence are deliberated also means that we take a particular position on power. Power is exercised in a myriad of ways within an economy of believability: juridical power in the context of the law and criminality; economic power in the privately owned media companies where struggles over believability take place; representational power that secures what Patricia Hill Collins (2008) has called “controlling images” of women and people of color in all forms of media. Again, we are informed by cultural studies in our understanding of power in the context of sexual violence: as McRobbie has written (discussing Hall’s contributions to cultural studies), “power works most effectively through articulation, through making connections across diverse and divergent fields, through a kind of stitching together process which consolidates power by means of negotiation, concession, sometimes reaching for consensus by means of tactical retreat” (2005, p. 3; see also Foucault, 1980). This articulation occurs across and within media platforms, in legal discourses, in philosophical histories, which work to “stitch together” not only relations of power, but more specifically the cultural mediated visibility of sexual violence in the contemporary moment through the most recent crisis of post-truth, the historical construction of doubtful subjects, and an economy of believability.
A “crisis” of post-truth
In the first decades of the twenty-first century, scores of books, articles, and opinion pieces have critiqued the idea of post-truth, as well as others that have critiqued the critique of post-truth. It is not our intention to rehearse that complex landscape here. Rather, we are interested in a component of post-truth that hasn’t been analyzed endlessly: the public visibility of stories about sexual violence that has exploded at the exact same historical moment as discourses about something called “post-truth” reach a heightened visibility. Again, what does it mean that, just as (some) women are feeling emboldened to speak out publicly about their experiences of sexual violence and garner (some) belief and recognition, we are also witnessing growing anxieties about the status of public “facts” and the role different sorts of evidence should (and should not) play in the negotiation of public truths – especially, in and through media?
It has become something of its own truism to insist that there’s nothing particularly “new” about post-truth rhetoric and discourse, despite the flurry of intellectual attention it has received in recent years, as truth has always been fundamentally entangled with power (Harsin, 2018; Foucault, 1980). By shifting the lens from truth to believability, we reposition the crisis of “post-truth” as a crisis of subjectivity, rather than epistemology. More specifically, we propose that the concept of “post-truth” offers a helpful reframing of how the representation of sexual violence operates through mediated practices; the framing of “post-truth” within believability also encourages us to question why post-truth endures as a “crisis” at the very same moment that we witness many disruptive interventions into (and through) these mediated practices, including the #MeToo movement but also other truth-speaking initiatives like #LivingWhileBlack (Williams, 2020). In this way, we take inspiration from antiracist critiques that have argued that “post-truth” is a lived historical reality for marginalized subjects. Simultaneously, such critiques emphasize post-truth as a popular descriptor for a self-perceived crisis of believability amongst those for whom the capacity to construct and assert public truths has been a historical given (Mejia et al., 2018; Mukherjee, 2017).
This point has been forcefully argued by Mejia, Beckermann, and Sullivan (2018) and Mukherjee (2017) in their critiques of the racial history of the post-truth moment. Mejia et al. call into question the newness of post-truth by detailing histories of racist practices in the United States. Their analysis highlights the longstanding role of redlining districts, discriminatory educational initiatives, and other economic imperatives in maintaining a post-truth condition around the lived realities of Black and Indigenous subjects. Mukherjee, writing about the lies of then-President Donald Trump and the subsequent counters of these lies by fact-checkers, media pundits, and politicians, also points out that post-truth politics is not a new phenomenon. Rather, it is a “new-ish” phenomenon for those in positions of power and privilege; historically, she argues, “the genealogies of racial, and racist, epistemic orders, which with visceral obduracy – in the face of incontrovertible countervailing evidence – have long organized truth and fact as profoundly raced categories of power-knowledge.” Taking direction from these critiques, we propose that these categories are deeply gendered as well as racialized. We see the convergence of #MeToo and the most recent post-truth crisis to be highly significant: the problem of who we believe, when, and why sits at the core of both anxieties about #MeToo and anxieties about post-truth.
But we also feel the convergence goes deeper than asking who we believe and why. While opportunities for public speech about sexual violence may have radically expanded in the wake of #MeToo, sexual violence itself is nonetheless constructed and maintained within a post-truth frame. For example, rape culture describes a historical infrastructure of meaning in which consent is not just routinely “fabricated” (that is, lied about), but, more fundamentally, devalued and/or rendered unimportant in our intimate lives. As we discuss in more length in Chapter 2, it is not simply that men who perpetrate sexual violence are empowered to lie about their actions or about acts of consent that did not take place, but that they are culturally empowered to not really care about consent – to view consent as a marginal concern in the everyday manifestation of their sexuality (see Durham, 2021). Rape culture is so named not because it encourages or cultivates an acceptability around something called “rape” itself – most people, if asked outright, would agree that “rape” is morally abhorrent and socially unacceptable. The core of rape culture is, rather, that it muddles our capacities to make many experiences intelligible as rape, and so publicly recognizable as violence.
Sexual violence is, in other words, the kind of “fact” that has been historically alienated from the question of truth: that is, constructed in ways that enforce radical contingency, unverifiability, and endemic doubtfulness. As we demonstrate across this book, this is multiply the case just as sexual violence is multiply factual: neither individual experiences of sexual assault, nor the status of sexual assault as invariably violent, nor the status of sexual violence as a sociopolitical (rather than simply individual) phenomenon, is easily established as resiliently “factual,” as all three are overwhelmingly contingent in women’s testimonies and so are always, inevitably, objects of doubt. This sense of permanent “irresolvability” is what most clearly unites the predicament of rape culture with the predicament of post-truth, and which most convincingly positions “post-truth” as an ongoing lived historical reality for women and other marginalized subjects.
Doubtful subjects
Feminist legal studies is incredibly helpful in understanding how the law defines sexual violence and places particular parameters around these definitions. However, despite the interventions posited by feminist legal studies, we find that legal discourse is limited in what it can do to actually challenge structural misogyny and racism. The law in the United States, for example, is by its own definition “neutral” – all persons are supposedly equal before the law. Before the law, according to its legitimating discourse authorized by the state, we are devoid of any particular history, culture, race, class, gender, sexuality. Differences between us are irrelevant to our right to our rights. Of course, some of the most important power relations in US society are masked by precisely these liberal categories (see Davis, 1983; MacKinnon, 1991; Brown, 1988; Williams,1991; Crenshaw, 1991; and others). That is, the liberal notion of formal equality before the law is authorized because of the operative dynamics of class, race, and gender power.
Despite this crucial limitation, which points to the inadequacies of addressing sexual violence through the law, legal discourses continue to dominate definitions of this kind of violence. One of the most common criticisms made about the contemporary #MeToo movement – and, indeed, about the broader shift in public believability it has engendered – is that public accusations of sexual violence undermine the criminal justice system as the “rightful” place for the evaluation of accusations of (criminalized) sexual harm and the allocation of punishment. Variously described as “mob justice,” “mob rule,” “the court of public opinion,” “trial by media,” or even “trial by Twitter,” these discourses position mediated believability as one in which accused men are at a particular structural disadvantage.
Feminist legal studies, and specifically its critiques of “credibility” as it relates to the concepts of doubt and consent, importantly intervenes in the conceit of the law operating as a “neutral” force or on an equal playing field. For example, definitions of consent have been at the core of the general concept of rape culture. “Rape culture” was coined as a term in 1975 in a documentary film of the same name, which detailed the relationships between and within patriarchy, sexual violence, and media entertainment that glamorizes rape (Lazarus and Wunderlich, 1975). During the 1970s and 1980s in the US, feminist theorists expanded on this notion of rape culture and how it relates to patriarchal and legal norms; as Catharine MacKinnon (1991) has argued, the legal concept of consent relies upon an assumption that consent can be freely given between liberal subjects. Yet, as she powerfully points out, liberal subjectivity does not take shape on a free and equal playing field; if women are always already constructed as subordinate to men, then the meaning of consent is emptied. Women are constructed as objects, men as subjects – and only subjects possess the capability to give consent (MacKinnon, 1991). Susan Brownmiller (1993) made the insistent point that rape is an act of power and violence, not sexual desire. In the contemporary moment, perhaps spurred on by #MeToo, there have been multiple books that address the issue of sexual violence and the law, including Leigh Gilmore’s Tainted Witness (2017) and Deborah Tuerkheimer’s Credible: Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers (2021). Tuerkheimer offers the concept of the “credibility complex” in legal discourse about sexual violence, a set of forces that shape not only our actions but our subjectivities. This “complex” positions women as less credible, and men as more credible: “The most vulnerable women experience credibility discounting at its most extreme, while men who are protected by greater status or position are the beneficiaries of massive credibility boosts” (2021, p. 3). For this reason, feminist legal scholars have long argued that within a court of law, the “truthfulness” of testimony is “indexed not to facts but to power” (Gilmore, 2017, p. 15).
Importantly, Black feminists, including Angela Y. Davis, Kimberlé Crenshaw, bell hooks, Cheryl Harris, Audre Lorde, and Patricia Williams, have long challenged the assumption that legal and carceral interventions can meaningfully support gender and racial justice. These scholars argue that there is a problematic assumption undergirding much legal scholarship: that the framework for understanding women as subjects is always a liberal individualist one. As mentioned earlier, this liberal framework, through its assumptions about who can be considered a person before the law, is itself premised on violence and exclusion. That is, feminist legal scholarship often invokes a more universal understanding of who and what a woman is, and how she is subject to the legal category of sexual violence. As Rana M. Jaleel eloquently questions in her The Work of Rape: “How do we think about sexualized violation when the fact of the body, the evidentiary truth of the violation, received notions of believability – liberal frameworks that delineate a possessive interest in one’s bodily person – were forged in fires stoked by shackles and slave bills of sale, looted lands, and their dispossessed multitudes?” (2021, p. 6). Similarly, Imani Perry has incisively argued that liberalism itself depends on a concept of personhood that deliberately and strategically excludes some groups, like enslaved people. As Perry (2018) points out, the nonrecognition of personhood is crucial to maintaining patriarchy (see also Brown, 2019). These histories, despite contemporary discourses of inclusion and diversity of people and expansions of rights, have a continuity with the present iterations of the law and the way it categorizes and delimits who and what a “person” is.
What these histories and contemporary feminist activism regarding gendered and sexual violence tell us is that feminists have long held an ambivalent position regarding the efficacy of the law to actually address the complexities of patriarchal violences and harms. Concepts such as consent, due process, doubt, credibility, and believability have been addressed by feminists, often through (or, through reference to) legal discourse. But as we know, these channels fail women in a multitude of ways, failing those most marginalized – women of color, but also trans women, queer people, sex workers, and criminalized women – most consistently and abjectly of all.
Of course, the law is not the only space where the politics of doubt is negotiated. Part of living a historical reality of post-truth is that women and other marginalized groups have been constructed and understood as “doubtful subjects”; their truths have always been suspect, questioned, and challenged, dismissed as subjective “experience” rather than objective “fact.” Doubt, which we explore in detail in Chapter 3, is and has been a key mechanism for discrediting women who accuse men of sexual violence – in courtrooms, of course, but also in media culture. Thus, other feminist histories have focused on media representations of sexual violence and their potential impact on social constructions of gender and race.
It is for that reason that we argue here for a shift in our analytic lens when theorizing gendered and racialized violence, a move from the epistemological question of singular “truths” to the more explicitly subjective (again, in the most literal sense, not as personal relativism) question of believability. One reason for this essential shift is that the “truth” of sexual violence is never singular, neither in a court of law nor in media culture. In this book we treat sexual violence as multiply factual, and testimonies of sexual violence as multiply believable and/or doubtable. Specifically, there are three different registers of belief that are (potentially) engaged when a person testifies publicly to an experience of sexual violence: sexual violence as personal experience, sexual violence as harmful, and sexual violence as structural phenomenon.
