The Accusing Body

Abstract

This essay addresses and critiques attempts by politicians to legislate the language used to describe and therefore define women’s experience of sexual assault. What is written from the body changes the body and vice versa; what is performed turns back on itself changing word and body. Rep. Bobby Franklin (R-Marietta) wants to label me “accuser,” thereby erasing my assaulted body unless and until “there’s a conviction in the matter.” There was never a conviction in the matter of my case. So where does that leave me? He doesn’t want me to claim victimage, as if being a victim is somehow a privilege, a legal labeling granted on “proof” of the attack. The assaulted body is changed by the legal replacement of “victim” for “accuser.” The word tries to displace or erase the action from the agent and replace it with a burden of proof. So following a most heinous experience, as “accuser,” the woman must now carry the burden of proving herself, accounting not only for her own experience, but also, that it actually happened. Performative autoethnography offers a method of intervening upon legislated language assaults by speaking from the body with agency and ethical representation. The possibilities of deconstructing “accuser” and reconstructing research that offers a multiplicity of being in the body of assault offers argument to oppressive gender notions of violence. Performative autoethnography offers hope and efficacy in the doing.