Cover not available
Part of
Exploring Language Aggression against Women
Edited by Patricia Bou-Franch
[Benjamins Current Topics 86] 2016
► pp. 37–58

De-authorizing rape narrators

Stance, taboo and privatizing the public secret

This chapter examines how reviewers take silence-sustaining or silence-breaking stances toward rape in online reviews of anti-terrorism expert, Jessica Stern’s (2010) book, Denial: A Memoir of Terror. I analyze how reviewers recontextualize the story of this uncontroversial rape and its narrator. The data consist of 47 reviews, ranging from professional reviewers at major newspapers to ‘citizen reviewers’ found on commercial bookstores’ websites and on readers’ blogs. Using stance as my analytic framework (Jaffe 2009), I show how readers align their reviews in ways that either authorize or de-authorize the narrator and her narrative.

Keywords: (de)authorizing, book reviews, denial, Jessica Stern, rape, silence, stance
Published online: 29 June 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.86.02tri
References
Austin, John L
1962 How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Bergen, Raquel
1996 Wife Rape: Understanding the Response of Survivors and Service Providers. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Beverley, John
1993 “The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio.” In Against Literature, ed. by John Beverley, 69–86. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
1999 Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory. Durham: Duke University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2001 “What Happens When the Subaltern Speaks: Rigoberta Menchú, Multiculturalism and the Presumption of Equal Worth.” In The Rigoberta Menchu’ Controversy, ed. by Arturo Arias, 219–236. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Blommaert, Jan
2005 Discourse: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bou-Franch, Patricia
2013 “Domestic Violence and Public Participation in the Media: The Case of Citizen Journalism.” Gender and Language 7: 275–302. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Coates, Linda, Janet Bavelas, and James Gibson
1994 “Anomalous Language in Sexual Assault Trial Judgments.” Discourse and Society 5 (2): 189–206. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
DuBois, John W
2007 “The Stance Triangle.” In Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction, ed. by Robert Englebretson, 139–182. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eades, Diana
2008 Courtroom Talk and Neocolonial Control. New York: Walter de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ehrlich, Susan
1998 “The Discursive Reconstructing of Sexual Consent.” Discourse and Society 9: 149–171. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2001 Representing Rape: Language and Sexual Consent. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2007a “Normative Discourses and Representations of Coerced Sex.” In The Language of Sexual Crime, ed. by Janet Cotterill, 126–138. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2007b “Legal Discourse and the Cultural Intelligibility of Gendered Meanings.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 11 (4): 452–477. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2012 “Text Trajectories, Legal Discourse and Gendered Inequalities.” Applied Linguistics Review 3 (1): 47–73. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Felman, Shoshanna, and Dori Laub
1992 Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature Psychoanalysis and History. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Finkelhor, David, and Kersti Yllo
1985 License to Rape: Sexual Abuse of Wives. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Frohmann, Lisa
1991 “Discrediting Victims’ Allegations of Sexual Assault: Prosecutorial Accounts of Case Rejections.” Social Problems 38 (2): 213–226. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gavey, Nicola
1999 “ ‘I Wasn’t Raped, but…’: Revisiting Definitional Problems with Sexual Victimization.” In New Versions of Victims: Feminists Struggle with the Concept, ed. by Sharon Lamb, 57–81, New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
2005 Just Sex?: The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Haag, Pamela
1996 “ ‘Putting your Body on the Line’: The Question of Violence, Victims, and the Legacies of Second-wave Feminism.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 8 (2): 23–67.Google Scholar
Hirsch, Susan F
1998 Pronouncing and Persevering: Gender and the Discourse of Disputing in African Islamic Court. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Jaffe, Alexandra
2009 “Introduction: The Sociolinguistics of Stance”. In Stance, ed. by Alexandra Jaffe, 3–28. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lamb, Sharon
1999a “Introduction.” In New Versions of Victims: Feminists Struggle with the Concept, ed. by Sharon Lamb, 1–12. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
1999b “Constructing the Victim: Popular Images and Lasting Labels.” In New Versions of Victims: Feminists Struggle with the Concept, ed. by Sharon Lamb, 108–138, New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Mardorossian, Carine M
2002 “Toward a New Feminist Theory of Rape.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 27 (3): 743–775. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Matoesian, Gregory M
1993 Reproducing Rape: Domination through Talk in the Courtroom. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
1999 “Intertextuality, Affect, and Ideology in Legal Discourse.” Text 19 (1): 73–109.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2001 Law and the Language of Identity: Discourse in the William Kennedy Smith Rape Trial. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
McCaughey, Martha
1997 Real Knockouts: The Physical Feminism of Women’s Self-Defense. New York and London: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Michael, Robert, John Gagnon, Edward Lauman, and Gina Kolata
1994 Sex in America: A Definitive Survey. New York: Little Brown and Company.Google Scholar
Mookherjee, Nayanika
2006 “ ‘Remembering to Forget’: Public Secrecy and Memory of Sexual Violence in the Bangladesh War of 1971.” Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute 12: 433–450. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mulla, Sameena
2011 “In Mother’s Lap: Forging Care and Kinship in Documentary Protocols of Sexual Assault Intervention.” Law, Culture and the Humanities 7 (3): 413–433. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Phillips, Lynn M
1999 “Recasting Consent: Agency and Victimization in Adult-teen Relationships.” New Versions of Victims: Feminists Struggle with the Concept, ed. by Sharon Lamb, 82–107. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Russell, Diane
1982 “The Prevalence and Incidence of Forcible Rape and Attempted Rape of Females.” Victimology: An International Journal 7 (1–4): 81–93.Google Scholar
Russell, Diane, and Nancy Howell
1983 “The Prevalence of Rape in the United States Revisited.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 8 (4): 688–695. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schiffrin, Deborah
1987 Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sommer, Dorris
1991 “Rigoberta’s Secrets.” Latina American Perspectives 18: 32–50. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty
1988 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stern, Jessica
2010 Denial: A Memoir of Terror. New York: Ecco Publishers.Google Scholar
Tannen, Deborah
1993 Framing in Discourse. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Taussig, Michael
1999 Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Palo Alto, CA.: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Trinch, Shonna
2001 “Managing Euphemism and Transcending Taboos: Negotiating the Meaning of Sexual Assault in Latinas’ Narratives of Domestic Violence.” Text 21 (4): 567–610.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2003 Latinas’ Narratives of Domestic Abuse: Discrepant Versions of Violence. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2007 “Deconstructing the ‘Stakes’ in High Stakes Gatekeeping Interviews: Battered Women and Narration.” Journal of Pragmatics 39 (11): 1895–1918. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010a “Disappearing Discourse: Performative Texts and Identity in Legal Contexts.” Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 7 (2): 207–229. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010b “Risky Subjects: Narrative, Literary Testimonio and Legal Testimony.” Dialectical Anthropology 34 (2): 179–204. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013 “Recalling Rape: Moving beyond What We Know.” In Legal-Lay Communication: Textual Travel in the Legal Process, ed. by Chris Heffer, Frances Rock, and John Conley, 288–306, Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ullman, Stephen
1966 “Semantic Universals.” In Universals in Language, ed. by Joseph Greenberg, 217–263. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Wood, Linda, and Heather Rennie
1994 “Formulating Rape: The Discursive Construction of Victims and Villains.” Discourse and Society 5 (1): 125–148. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Andrus, Jennifer & Nicole Clawson
2022. ‘We get that’: Narrative indexicality and the construction of frustration in police stories about domestic violence victim/survivors. Language in Society ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Ehrlich, Susan
2019. Language and Sexual Violence in the Legal System. In The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality, DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 15 september 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.