When Chelsea Manning was arrested in May 2010 for leaking massive
amounts of classified Army and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks,
she was almost immediately profiled by the mainstream press as a
troubled person: someone who had experienced harassment due to her
sexual orientation and gender non-conformity, and who leaked
documents not on behalf of the public good, but out of motives of
personal revenge or, as suggested in the New York Times, "delusions
of grandeur." Compared implicitly to Daniel Ellsberg's apparently
selfless devotion to the truth and the public good, Manning comes
up short in these profiles-a failed whistleblower who deserves pity
rather than political solidarity. The first book-length theoretical
treatment of Manning's actions, Insurgent Truth argues for seeing
Manning's example differently: as an act of what the book terms
"outsider truth-telling." Bringing Manning's truth-telling into
conversation with democratic, feminist, and queer theory, the book
argues that outsider truth-tellers such as Manning tell or enact
unsettling truths from a position of social illegibility.
Challenging the social alignment of credibility with gendered,
classed, and raced traits, outsider truth-tellers reveal oppression
and violence that the dominant class would otherwise not see, and
disclose the possibility of a more egalitarian form of life. Read
as outsider truth-telling, the book argues that Manning's acts were
not aimed at curbing corporate or governmental bad acts, but
instead at transforming public discourse and agency, and inciting a
solidaristic public. The book suggests that Manning's actions offer
a productive example of democratic truth-telling for all of us.
Lida Maxwell develops this argument through an examination of
Manning's prison writings, the lengthy chat logs between Manning
and the hacker who eventually turned her in, various journalistic,
artistic, and academic responses to Manning, and by comparing
Manning's example and writings with the work and actions of other
outsider truth-tellers, including Cassandra, Virginia Woolf, Bayard
Rustin, and Audre Lorde. Showing the shortcomings of existing
approaches to truth and politics, Maxwell advances a new
theoretical framework through which to understand truth-telling in
politics: not only as a practice of offering a pre-political common
ground of "facts" to politics, but also as the practice of
unsettling public discourse by revealing the oppression and
domination that it often masks.
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