Private Manning and the Chamber of Secrets

This article explores news coverage from 2010–2013 of Chelsea (formerly known as Bradley) Manning’s disclosures of both state and gender secrets to discover how government actors, journalists, and social movement leaders disciplined emergent truths in two modalities. The first modality is juridical, involving Manning’s trial and reporting that focuses attention exclusively on Manning’s crime against the state; the second is biopolitical, disciplining Manning by discrediting her body and voice as troubled, confused, damaged, weak, irrational, and pathological. That Manning’s disclosures resulted in repressive and discursive discipline does not mean that such an outcome was inevitable. Rather than abandoning disclosure as a democratic project, we might ask ourselves how the rhetorical process of disclosure might open up a contradictory publicity that critically exposes the complexity of discipline itself.