ABSTRACT
“Speaking out, countering sexual humiliation, transforming oneself” begins by providing an overview of parrhēsia as Foucault presents it in his 1983 Collège de France course, The Government of Self and Others. As a sort of counter-confession, parrhēsia cultivates a mode of self-relation that directly opposes obedience, conformity, individuation, and internalization and therefore self-renunciation. The chapter focuses on “judicial” parrhēsia, the paradigmatic example of which for Foucault entails a woman confronting her rapist. The chapter proceeds by analyzing the feminist significance of particular acts of verbal anti-sexual violence protest, including legal testimony by the victims/survivors of former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw, the Brown University “rape list,” and #MeToo. I show that these protests reflect definitive characteristics of judicial parrhēsia, elucidate their counter-normalizing/counter-humiliating effects, and argue that they can be seen as expressing counter-normalizing/counter-humiliating modes of self-relation: the protests afford speakers the possibility of experiencing their relationship to truth and hence to themselves differently – specifically, in ways that disrupt the internalization and individuation that characterize subjectivity and upon which sexual humiliation hinges. I conclude the chapter by considering what it has cost the speakers in question to loosen their attachments to subjectivity.
