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Abstract
Through an analysis of Lacy Crawford’s 2020 memoir Notes on a Silencing, this essay forwards a theory of injury epistemology and highlights how epistemic violence attends sexual violence. We define injury epistemology as the ways in which being injured can lead one to feminist knowledge or understanding.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Crawford, Notes, 5, 69, and 380.
2 Ibid., 68.
3 Ibid., 69.
4 Ibid., 61.
5 Scholars of autobiography and life writing have long distinguished, in narrative terms, between the older, often wiser narrating “I” and the younger, less knowledgeable or experienced narrated “I.” See, for example, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography; Gilmore and Marshall, Witnessing Girlhood; and Paul John Eakin, Living Autobiographically. In addition, philosopher Peter Goldie has written about how we think about our lives and memories in narrative terms. Goldie differentiates a narrative sense of self from the self as a metaphysical reality, arguing that any autobiographical narrative requires a sense of self across the tenses of past, present, and future (see The Mess Inside).
6 See Brison, Aftermath; Caruth, Unclaimed Experience; Gilmore, Limits of Autobiography and Tainted Witness; Stern, “He Won’t Hurt Us.”
7 Brown, States of Injury. See also Brophy, “Mediated Embodiments”; Kruger and DasGupta, “Embodiment.”
8 Crawford, Notes, 69.
9 See Gilmore, Tainted Witness.
10 Gilmore and Marshall, Witnessing Girlhood, 9.
11 Crawford, Notes, 382.
12 Machado, Dream House; Bowdler, Is Rape a Crime?; Elliott, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground.
13 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice; Dotson, “Tracking”; Manne, Down Girl.
14 Gilmore, Tainted Witness; Gilmore and Marshall, Witnessing Girlhood.
15 See African American Policy Forum, “Status of Black Women’s Health”; Matthew, Just Medicine; Roberts, Killing; Walker-Barnes, Too Heavy; Walton, “Black Women’s”; White, Black Women’s Health Book.
16 hooks, Feminist Theory.
17 See Rondot, “Bear Witness,” for a useful discussion of trans* epistemology.
18 Kulbaga, “Necessary Context.”
19 Elliott, 135.
20 Ibid., 143.
21 Hesford, Violent Exceptions, xii.
22 This erasure of Black women and girls is replicated at the level of citation. For example, though Me Too was founded by Tarana Burke in 2006 to help girls and young women of color who had survived sexual assault, it was popularized in 2017 by Alyssa Milano in reference to Harvey Weinstein. When #MeToo went viral and global, many mistakenly attributed the phrase and the movement to Milano, a famous white woman, and not to Burke, a Black social worker from The Bronx. See Leung and Williams, “#MeToo and Intersectionality”; Nathaniel, “#MeToo Mishaps”; Trott, “Networked Feminism”; Kulbaga, “Necessary Context.”
23 Gilmore and Marshall, Witnessing, 2.
24 Ibid., 3.
25 Crawford, Notes, 161.
26 Gilmore, Tainted, 7.
27 Gilmore and Marshall, Witnessing, 5 (our emphasis).
28 Crawford, Notes, 69.
29 Ibid., 277.
30 Ideologically, we object to mandatory reporting policies for many reasons, not least of which is the way they rob agency from people already harmed by sexual violence (see Kulbaga and Spencer, Campuses). We explicitly disavow carceral politics and carceral feminism, the collusion of white feminism with statist police violence (Bernstein, “Militarized Humanitarianism”; Mack and McCann, “Critiquing State”). More police involvement, harsher sentences, and increased reliance on carceral solutions for sexual violence or any other problem will always disproportionately harm Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; queer and trans people; and especially people who live at the intersection of multiple of these identities (Bassichis et al., “Building”; Davis, “Rape”). Our point here, though, is that the school had a legal obligation to report to police and did not do it, even as they did tell students and staff about Lacy’s assault.
31 Crawford, Notes, 287; 305; 305.
32 Ibid., 305–306.
33 On epistemic gaslighting, see Graves and Spencer, “Rethinking”; Graves and Spencer, “Against”; Ivy, “Allies”; Ivy, “Gaslighting”; Manne, “What Is Gaslighting?”
34 This quotation appears in the unnumbered pages of frontmatter in Crawford, Notes.
35 Harding, Whose Science?; Hill Collins, “Learning”; O’Brien Hallstein, “A Postmodern Caring”; Wood, “Feminist Scholarship.”
36 Muñoz, The Sense of Brown.
37 Kendall, Hood Feminism.
38 See Kulbaga, “Necessary Context,” for a discussion of Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House and epistemic violence.
39 Grosfoguel, “Del extractivismo,” 7 (our emphasis).
40 Spencer, “Pink.”
41 Driskill, Asegi Stories; LeMaster et al., “Unlearning Cisheteronormativity.”
42 Deer, Rape.
43 Brison, Aftermath.
44 Frietag, “Four Transgressive Declarations”; Harris, “The Next Problem”; Spry, “In the Absence.”
45 Kulbaga and Spencer, Campuses, 141.
46 Graves and Spencer, “Rethinking.”
47 Crawford, Notes, 25.
48 Ibid., 272.
49 Ibid., 70.
50 Gilmore and Marshall, Witnessing, 56–57.
51 Crawford, Notes, 323.
52 Donegan, “I Started.”
53 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice. Hermeneutic injustice, which we will discuss later, is injustice based on a cultural lack of language or resources to adequately interpret or understand an experience.
54 Cahill, “Disclosing,” 189.
55 Crawford, Notes, 273.
56 Ibid., 140.
57 Ibid., 279.
58 Ehrlich, Representing Rape; Kulbaga and Spencer, Consent.
59 Ibid.
60 See also Spencer, “Performative Neutrality.”
61 Sweeney.
62 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice.
63 Ibid., 1.
64 Crawford, Notes, 5.
65 Ibid., 8.
66 Crawford, Notes, 11.
67 Crawford, Notes, 16–17.
68 Crawford, Notes, 11 (emphasis in original).
69 Dotson, “Tracking”; Manne, Down Girl.
70 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice.
71 Gilmore, Tainted, 13.
72 Crawford, Notes, 52.
73 Ibid., 18.
74 Ibid., 69.
75 Ibid., 319.
76 Ibid., 339, 345.
77 Ibid., 380.
78 Ibid., 346.
79 Ibid., 380.
80 Ibid., 346.
81 Ibid., 382.
82 See Spencer, Rape; Purnell, Becoming.
83 Gilmore, Limits, 44.
84 Crawford, Notes, 382.
85 Nelson, The Argonauts.
86 Crawford, Notes, 382.
87 Ibid., 199.
88 Ibid., 380.
89 Ibid., 380.
90 Ibid., 357.
91 Ibid., 380. Critiques of the criminal punishment system as a means of justice abound, and some scholars have suggested that for some offenses, restorative justice practices offer viable alternatives. While those debates lie beyond the scope of this essay, we hesitate to forward restorative justice as a fitting response to sexual violence because of the potential for abuse and multiplied harm. For a summary of these arguments, see Spencer, Rape (especially the introduction).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Theresa A. Kulbaga
Theresa A. Kulbaga is Professor of English at Miami University and the coauthor of Campuses of Consent: Sexual and Social Justice in Higher Education (University of Massachusetts Press, 2019). Her essays on women’s autobiography, transnational feminism, and pedagogy appear in Prose Studies, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, JAC, College English, and English Journal, among others.
Leland G. Spencer
Leland G. Spencer (PhD, University of Georgia) is professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary and Communication Studies and affiliate faculty in the Department of Media, Journalism, and Film and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Miami University. He is coauthor of Campuses of Consent (University of Massachusetts Press, 2019), author of Women Bishops and Rhetorics of Shalom (Lexington, 2017), and coeditor of Transgender Communication Studies (Lexington, 2015). Leland has published more than twenty peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles in outlets such as Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication Studies, Women & Language, and others.