ABSTRACT
Paul Ricoeur reminds people that witness is a linking figure, a figure tying the event of violence to veracity, allowing the testimony of the violated to stand as legible truth through this proxy of the witness. The gender of the witness is not ethically material: a feminine witness figure may or may not stand as a benign support for the victim, and yet the central figure of the works in study is the feminine witness figure. Carrie Mae Weems’s witness figure in From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried risks the edge of violation, risks violating her subjects and her audience, a choice interpreted by some critics as participating in the pleasurable array of victims for sadistic visual consumption. Elaine Scarry’s analysis of the structure of torture alludes to just this imprimatur of passivity that separates ethical thought from action when she describes in painful detail the way that “world” is stripped away from the victim of torture.
