Description
As secret exposers, women whistleblowers cut through the historically idealized tradition of a woman’s silence and use the disclosure of secrets to resist, undermine, and challenge patriarchal institutions from within. For disclosing institutionalized secrets, they risk having their voices devalued and experiencing severe personal and professional retaliation. Despite a recent imperative in popular culture for women to speak out, a ‘communicative injustice’ persists in which women are compelled to position themselves within a public space which seeks to silence them. Simultaneously, women whistleblowers’ voices and stories are constantly reproduced by the cultural public sphere. This leads to a broader query as to how actors within that sphere identify their roles in the (re)production of these gendered power dynamics. Cultural producers who mediate women whistleblowers’ stories of secret-breaking, must navigate the need to entertain and inform, knowing that they hold responsibility for how they do, or do not, contribute to gendered communicative injustice. We explore how these women’s voices are mediated in the public space through interviews with television producers, and a qualitative content analysis, of documentaries framing the accounts of women who leaked information on powerful state and non-state institutions in the UK.
