"You Have to Confess": Rape and the Politics of Storytelling

This article discusses the idea of narratives of women’s experiences of rape. It addresses the ways in which narratives are often shaped for and by the judicial system, and explores other ways of reconstructing rape narratives.

The author writes, “My goal here is to examine some of the ways in which mainstream responses to rape may be shaped by the demands of the judicial system in problematic ways, and to explore the power of alternative testimony such as memoir to unsettle preconceived notions about sexual violence” (p. 19).