I’ve been thinking a lot about the revelations of sexual assault/harassment that have been extending everywhere from prominent Hollywood actors and producers to politicians to journalists.

I feel like this kind of relates to what we’ve been talking about this semester. There seems to be this tension between whether allegations are made to be credible or not. And, in a way, the stories of men and women who’ve undergone abuse become a sort of mini-autobiography, because they are self-communicated stories of what has happened to someone. But then, there exists this public discourse about which of these “autobiographies” are “legitimate” and which are called into question for their authenticity. (Also, I hate to use the word “allegation” because that serves to undermine the validity of these stories, while at the same time the word “allegation” serves a legal purpose.)

It’s interesting to think that on the human-level, some people will outright claim that these allegations are untrue when they are just people telling other people about their lives. When thinking of these allegations through the prism of autobiography, I think it creates a humanizing effect and it becomes harder and harder to discredit people who experienced trauma. It kind of calls into question why we disregard some stories immediately, while other stories we take at face value. Obviously, there is a historical thread of patriarchal defamation of women’s voices, and that makes the idea of “legitimate autobiography” all the more interesting.

Sorry, these thoughts are kind of scattered, but I am curious what other people think about this.

A particular portion of Kimberle Crenshaw’s essay reminded me of another class. In my history class, we had to listen to this podcast in which this historian, Jennifer L. Morgan, talked about her research on enslaved women in the British-American colonies. In particular, Morgan talked about how enslaved women were forced to complete the same tasks as their male counterparts. This reminded me of Crenshaw’s argument that the perceived female trait of passivity isn’t a trait of women, but a trait of white women (155). Black women weren’t seen as “weak,” because they were made to complete physically and emotionally arduous tasks. When, in feminist discourse, there isn’t an acknowledgement of who exactly is intended by “women,” it serves to erase the experience of black women. Alternatively, it is important, as Crenshaw argues, to acknowledge differences in experience and the ways in which the intersection of identities puts some women in more peril than others.

Link to the podcast: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/episode-070-jennifer-l-morgan-how-historians-research/