Anonymity as Outsider Tactic

The chapter examines the promise of anonymity, and especially Chelsea Manning’s attempted anonymity, as an outsider tactic. Anonymous leaking is typically depicted as a problem for democracy because it hinders the demos from judging an individual’s motives and truthfulness. However, the chapter argues, through discussion of Virginia Woolf’s and Bayard Rustin’s examples, that outsiders’ refusal to identify themselves in public or private terms can also signal the failure of those terms to capture the significance of outsider speech and identity. The chapter suggests that outsider anonymity also creates counter-archives and repertoires in which outsiders may find their significance better illuminated. Read in this way, Manning’s anonymity—which she explains as necessary so that her picture will not be plastered everywhere “as a boy”—should be read as a marker of the insufficiency of public categories for capturing her experience, identity, and act.

Chelsea Manning and the Politics of Truth-Telling

This chapter argues that reading Chelsea Manning as an outsider truth-teller, and developing a defense of outsider truth-telling, is important to our understanding of the relationship between democracy and truth more generally. Outsider truth-telling reveals problems with, and offers an important alternative to, our dominant understanding of truth and democracy, namely, that democracy is dependent on truth because it offers prepolitical stability for a society of diverse viewpoints. The chapter argues that this dominant view actually grew out of particular historical circumstances and is tied to a raced, classed, and gendered conception of truth-telling. In this context, outsider truth-tellers should be understood as crucial yet vulnerable figures in democracy, revealing from a position of social illegibility an unsettling reality that their societies need to see. This chapter calls democratic theorists to raise, thematize, and address, as central concerns for democracy, the predicaments and problems surrounding outsider truth-telling.

Chelsea Manning as Transformative Truth-Teller

The chapter argues for reading Chelsea Manning as a transformative truth-teller. Through close examination of the chat logs between Manning and Adrian Lamo, the chapter argues that we should value rather than dismiss the connections Manning makes between her “private” struggles with Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and her struggles with mandated secrecy of information about government abuses of power in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The chapter reads Manning’s truth-telling, and her connection between public and private, not as simply an attempt to state or reveal facts, but also as an enactment of herself, as a gender nonconforming person and a person resistant to the army’s articulation of the national interest, as a proper speaker and defender of the public good. Yet her leaking aims not to restore institutions to normal functioning, but rather to transform the world so that she and her truths can be seen as significant.

Public, Private, Insurgent

Through discussion of feminist and queer conceptions of “the outsider,” this chapter develops a distinctive conception of outsider truth-telling as the practice of refusing the public/private divide that structures norms of proper speech and comportment. Outsider truth-telling reveals a reality of oppression and domination that productively unsettles society and enables outsider survival as flourishing. Yet this outsider practice of truth-telling is also inhabited by a dilemma: how to maintain a capacity to speak truth to the public and private realms (and be heard by them) that depends at the same time on remaining outside of those realms in some sense. The chapter suggests that the creation and imagination of tenuous outsider spaces (focusing on Virginia Woolf’s “bridge” and Anna Julia Cooper’s “corner”) offers a promising way to negotiate this dilemma and create a political imaginary where one need not be absorbed by public and private realms to speak to them.

“I used to only know how to write memos”

This chapter argues against seeing our contemporary moment as part of a “post-truth era” and instead situates Trump’s dismissal of facts as one nodal point in a broader crisis of the modern ideal of dispassionate speakers of rational truth. Viewed in this way, we may see our contemporary moment as containing sites of political danger and political promise. In this context, the chapter argues that outsider truth-telling offers a set of alternative precedents of possibly more democratic or emancipatory models of truth-telling that help us rethink what truth-telling does, and might do, for politics. Through a reading of Manning’s prison writings, I argue that outsider truth-telling is not only unsettling but also creates an alternative form of stability as creative solidarity.

Telling the Truth, Changing the World

Chapter 5 argues that Manning’s leaking of the Collateral Murder video may have changed, or be at work in changing, the world. Mobilizing a reading of Virginia Woolf’s use of war photographs in Three Guineas, the contention of the chapter is that leaking or displaying images of war may not have its primary impact through assuring accountability of elites but rather through changing the world: transforming various functional sites (offices, sitting rooms, work computers) into sites of truth-telling and empowerment. As an example, the chapter discusses the story of Ethan McCord, an infantryman who appears in the Collateral Murder video rushing to pick up the children injured by the shooting from the army helicopter. Seeing his own image in the video prompted McCord to take responsibility for his actions and to begin a broader anti-war campaign.