Witness: Volume 36, number 1 &; 2 Witness Spring/Summer

This title explores how 'bearing witness' exposes inequalities of power and can lead to revolutionary movements like feminism. Feminism was born of acts of witness, and throughout its many transformations bearing witness has played crucial roles. Women speaking out about their own experiences, or the injustices they see around them, have provoked resistance, and called entrenched structures of power to account. But witnessing can also be an equivocal process: opportunities for bearing witness are strongly shaped by their institutional, political, and cultural settings; and potentially powerful messages may be assimilated to dominant discourses, or isolate those bearing witness outside influential processes of governance.In this issue, we explore the challenges of bearing witness: we look at the legal and political contexts that have structured women's efforts to testify to injustice; we examine new methodologies - such as the graphic novel - that feminists have used to bear witness, and the role of objects in the process of witnessing; and we highlight the experience of contemporary and historical feminist witnesses to oppression, genocide, and transformation. Featuring essays by scholars such as Susan Brison, Ann Cvetkovich, Marianne Hirsch, Rosanne Kennedy, Nancy Miller, Judith Resnik, Valerie Smith, and Leo Spitzer, and a retrospective on the work of Judith Herman, this issues asks how witnessing might be understood and fortified as a vehicle for feminist understanding, resistance and change.