This Is Stalking

Stalked by a neighbour who emailed her an explicit fantasy of his obsession, Cara-Julie Kather urgently sought a way out of her lease and an escape from the creep next door. The landlord company saw it from the stalker’s perspective: they wouldn’t agree to terminate the lease, as this was all a misunderstanding of a man’s benign, if awkward, expression of love.

Navigating a hostile legal and housing landscape, Kather began to recognize the narratives that framed stalking as nothing more than an expression of love that could be humoured, endured, or ignored, but not defied, let alone defined.

In This Is Stalking, Kather retells her experience of being stalked and her efforts to find safety from the neighbour on the other side of the paper-thin walls. Through a series of poignant essays rooted in feminist inquiry, Kather describes the social and cultural ideas about stalking that perpetuate narrative violence: the violence embedded in the ways stories are told and who gets to tell them under which circumstances. Kather shows that the pernicious social narratives about stalking have real, material consequences for victims’ lives, but that naming, understanding, and theorizing these narratives is an important site of contestation in the struggle for feminist justice.

An elegant and erudite translation by Madeleine Stratford captures a courageous testimony and deft assessment of patriarchal violence and the role of naming and storytelling in survival.