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CanVoice and Truth Coexist? Experience Drama Kingsfield,Williston, and Bok do not write in the first person. It connotes subjectivity, the antithesis of the impersonal style. Resort to the first person blurs the distinction between analysis and whimsy. Kingsfield’s worst nightmare is narrative, the ultimate in first-person perversion.To Kingsfield, narrative includes the parables of Derrick Bell and the autobiographical stories of Patricia Williams. In addition, there are experience dramas. Eleven years ago, a man held a an ice pick to my throat and said:“Push over, shut up, or I’ll kill you.” I did what he said, but I couldn’t stop crying.A hundred years later, I jumped out of the car as he drove away. This is the first sentence in Susan Estrich’s Yale Law Review article“Rape.” A firsthand experience with a violent crime forced Estrich to face the reality that “the law was against me.”When she was unable to identify the assailant from mug shots, the investigation ceased.To the police, rape was not a high-priority crime; it did not involve the violence of armed assault, robbery , or murder.Then came the psychological trauma and the unacceptable contradiction:“If it isn’t my fault, why am I supposed to be ashamed?” Kingsfield would disapprove;he would see the reference as a tactic by Estrich to gain sympathy for her arguments and analysis. It is personal, and the proper place for the disclosure of a personal interest is in a footnote. Kings- field is wrong. It is an extremely effective use of an experience as an introduction . In the first two of ninety-seven pages, she uses a personal drama to anticipate the implications of the points she covers in her article. “Experiencing” an article with a brief description of a personal drama does not always work.Sanford Levinson writes that the Second Amendment allows citizens to arm themselves in order to repel the illegitimate authority and activities of the state.The ramifications of Levinson’s republicanism disturb Wendy Brown, who considers it similar to a big tent, covering groups 7 134 with little in common—nature lovers like her along with evil NRA types. She also sees the lurking menace of patriarchy and, to dramatize her point, concludes her doctrinal rebuttal with an experience.After a week of hiking in the Sierra Nevada,she and her friends discovered their car would not start. There was help:“a California sportsman making his way through a case of beer, flipping through the pages of a porn magazine, preparing to survey the area for his hunting club in anticipation for the opening of deer season.” He fixed the car, and she drove away.Then it occurred to her that under different circumstances—for example, had she encountered him in the woods without her friends—her “one great and appropriate fear” would have been rape. Given her prowess at self-defense, his gun could have made the difference .The vision from her encounter with the NRA crystallizes: putting her and other females under the same big encompassing tent leaves them at risk to patriarchy.“Is his right [to guns] my violation, and might his be precisely the illegitimate authority I am out to resist?” Outsiders circulate the refrain that everyone is writing stories.This has nourished the chic subgenre of using descriptions of experiences to introduce and furnish context for analysis. It worked for Estrich because her encounter verified specific defects in the administration of rape laws and validated her analysis.The experience of an implied threat from a NRA type fails to say anything about the Second Amendment.It subverts the energy of the text. Good editing would have encouraged Brown to spin her anger against the NRA as symbol for patriarchy into a separate article. The encounter is too contrived. The ring of truth gave Estrich’s story power; we know it happened.The ice pick threatening her throat gets the reader’s attention.Maybe Brown did have her experience,but a good ol’boy sitting by his trustyWinnibago guzzling “a case” (twenty-four is a case, six is a six-pack) of beer while ravishing a porn magazine is sufficiently stereotypical to make the reader pause.This pause exposes a serious problem with the use of the experience genre;by going autobiographical,the author makes veracity an issue. Credibility is critical when reference to an experience is used to embellish substantive arguments...

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