When more than 150 women testified in 2018 to the sexual abuse inflicted
on them by Dr. Larry Nassar when they were young, competitive gymnasts,
they exposed and transformed the conditions that shielded their
violation, including the testimonial disadvantages that cluster at the
site of gender, youth, and race. In Witnessing Girlhood, Leigh
Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall argue that they also joined a long
tradition of autobiographical writing led by women of color in which
adults use the figure and narrative of child witness to expose harm and
seek justice. Witnessing Girlhood charts a history of how women use
life narrative to transform conditions of suffering, silencing, and
injustice into accounts that enjoin ethical response. Drawing on a deep
and diverse archive of self-representational forms--slave narratives,
testimonio, memoir, comics, and picture books--Gilmore and Marshall
attend to how authors return to a narrative of traumatized and silenced
girlhood and the figure of the child witness in order to offer public
testimony. Emerging within these accounts are key scenes and figures
that link a range of texts and forms from the mid-nineteenth century to
the contemporary period. Gilmore and Marshall offer a genealogy of the
reverberations across timelines, self-representational acts, and
jurisdictions of the child witness in life writing. Reconstructing these
historical and theoretical trajectories restores an intersectional
testimonial history of writing by women of color about sexual and racist
violence to the center of life writing and, in so doing, furthers our
capacity to engage ethically with representations of vulnerability,
childhood, and collective witness.
