ABSTRACT
The book’s Introduction, “How much does It cost for victims/survivors to tell the truth?” elucidates a theme that underpins and in turn gets taken up within analyses contained in the book’s substantive chapters: the struggle on the part of victims/survivors of sexual violence to make sense of and meaningfully convey both their experiences and the effects of such violence. I refer to the 2018 Senate Judiciary Committee hearings that ultimately resulted in Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court in order to bring this theme into sharp relief. The hearings illustrate how the systemic sexism and misogyny that characterize gendered power relations complicate an already fraught meaning-making process, on the one hand, and undermine possibilities for meaningfully expressing the truth of the experience of sexual violence, on the other. In short, gendered relations of power not only produce conditions for the possibility of and are in turn reasserted by sexual violence against women, through practices such as victim-blaming, gendered power also redoubles the sexual humiliation such violence inflicts. The Introduction thus illustrates the need for the critical analyses of sexual violence and sexual humiliation that follows in the rest of the book, which opens onto possibilities for feminist resistance.
