Erasure of discursive responsibility in online testimonies of street harassment

This article analyzes the narrative complexity of women’s online testimonies of verbal street harassment. We examined the relations between reported and reporting speech and the degree of subjectivity in 74 posts extracted from the PAYE TA SHNEK website. Each post was considered to form a mini-narrative falling into one of the following categories: minimal, elementary, and complex narrative. While offensive speech is recontextualized and subverted in all these categories, hey also reflect an evolution of these online testimonies as a genre whose goal is to emancipate the women who post and read the testimonies. Thus, posts consisting of a simple quotation and erasing the enunciator disappear gradually in favor of posts emphasizing the subjectivity of the narrator-enunciator and the co-presence of the narrating “I” and the experiencing “I."Peer reviewe