A Rupture in the Courtroom: Collective Rhetoric, Survivor Speech, and the Subversive Limits of the Victim Impact Statement

In 2018, 156 survivors took over a small courtroom in Lansing, Michigan, to deliver victim impact statements at the sentencing hearing of Larry Nassar. This article argues that the survivors collectivized their voices and mobilized the subversive potential of the victim impact statement (VIS) to disrupt courtroom norms, hegemonic scripts, and generic expectations that contain and diminish testimony of sexual violence. This article also argues that white supremacy animated this moment of rhetorical rupture and demonstrates how racist logics of worthy victimhood infect the rhetorical potential of the VIS genre and restrict opportunity for disruption within its form. This case study explicates the counterhegemonic promise of survivor speech, the subversive limits of generic rupture, and the role that race, power, and privilege play in the mobilization of collective rhetoric.