Rethinking Silence, Voice and Agency in Contested Gendered Terrains

Beyond the Binary

Jane L. Parpart, Swati Parashar, Jane L. Parpart, Swati Parashar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351719377
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Global and local contestations are not only gendered, they also raise important questions about agency and its practice and location in the twenty-first century. Silence and voice are being increasingly debated as sites of agency within feminist research on conflict and insecurity. Drawing on a wide range of feminist approaches, this volume examines the various ways that silence and voice have been contested in feminist research, and their impact on how agency is understood and performed, particularly in situations of conflict and insecurity.

The collection makes an important and timely contribution to interdisciplinary feminist theorizing of silence, voice and agency in global politics. Interrogating the intellectual landscape of existing debates about agency, silence and voice in an increasingly unequal and conflict-ridden world, the contributors to this volume challenge the dominant narratives of agency based on voice or speech alone as a necessary precondition for understanding or negotiating agency or empowerment. Many of the authors have engaged in field research in both the Global South and North and bring in-depth and diverse gendered case studies to their analysis, focusing on the increasing importance of examining silence as well as voice for understanding gender and agency in an increasingly embattled and complicated world.

This book will contribute to and deepen existing discussions of agency, silence and voice in development, culture and gender studies, political economy, postcolonial and de-colonial scholarship as well as in the field of International Relations.

1Introduction

Rethinking the power of silence in insecure and gendered sites

Jane L. Parpart and Swati Parashar

Introduction

Feminist movements around the world have grown out of women’s struggles against patriarchal privilege and sexist power structures. In the nineteenth century, the North American and European movements took center stage as they fought for increased respect and legal rights, particularly the right to speak out in public arenas. Feminist leaders and activists spoke out wherever they could, wrote treatises and books condemning patriarchal privilege and even took to the streets to demonstrate against women’s oppression. These struggles framed feminist movements in a binary that privileged vocal challenges to patriarchal power. Feminist heroines who spoke out against male privilege and patriarchy became ideals for young women (and men in some cases). Embedded in Western liberal values that privileged individual actors and open debate, early feminist movements applauded women (and their few male allies) who spoke out against gender inequality and injustice (Gilligan, 1982; Madhok et al., 2013; Berkin and Norton, 1979). Silence was regarded as a sign of weakness, particularly for women, and the ability to speak out for women’s rights, especially in public, became a litmus test for women’s liberation and agency (Olsen, 1978).

In an increasingly global and complex world, this argument no longer holds water. Since the late 1990s, feminist authors, including many concerned with (in)security and development, have begun to expand and complicate thinking about gender, silence and voice, particularly regarding gender inequality, power and violence (Mahmood, 2005; Madhok et al., 2013). The flowering of writings on gender in the Global South has challenged western liberal assumptions and complicated analyses of gender, silence/voice and power around the world (Agathangelou and Ling, 2009). This debate has important implications for the burgeoning feminist security studies literature as well as broader discussions of gender, political economy and culture in a complicated and multipolar world.

Rethinking Silence, Voice and Agency in Contested Gendered Terrains will explore the power of silence in a world where voice is too often privileged as the ultimate sign of power. Drawing on Christine Sylvester’s War as Experience (2013), the book starts from the assumption that people and their individual and collective embodied experiences are essential building blocks for understanding the gendered impact of war, insecurity and inequality. Inspired by the complex literature interrogating silence, the contributors, from a number of disciplines, challenge the assumption that silence is always a sign of disempowerment, and explore the many ways where silence can be empowering in a complex neo-liberal and postcolonial world. The book aims to contribute to on-going debates about silence, voice, gender and power, with particular attention to how these debates can contribute to the burgeoning literatures of feminist security studies, and global political economy.

Reconsidering gender, silence, voice and power

Mainstream feminisms, including liberal, Marxist and radical perspectives, as well as gender and development advocates, have for the most part framed their understanding of women’s agency in relation to the power of men, the inequalities facing women, and the need for women to speak out against inequality in order to achieve a more gender equitable world. These concerns remain central to the feminist project, and are legitimately seen as core issues for achieving gender equality around the world. However, mainstream feminisms have been largely embedded in Western enlightenment thought, with its emphasis on individual actors, rational scientific perspectives and democratic processes. As a result, the women’s movement, particularly in the Global North, initially focused on the need to challenge patriarchal power in order to achieve greater equality between women and men (Mahmood, 2005; Olsen, 1978).

Women’s voice and agency have been at the heart of this project. Mainstream feminists focused on increasing women’s access to male-dominated institutions, especially those controlling political and economic power. They fought against perceptions of women as weak, incapable of rational, responsible action, in need of protection and best suited for domestic life. Salvation was sought in individual actors, revolutionary feminist heroines willing to stand up for women’s rights and to speak out against patriarchal authorities and power structures (Olsen, 1978; Madhok et al., 2013). This perspective reinforced the binary underpinnings of mainstream feminism, with its divide between vocal feminist warriors and complicit, often silent/silenced, supporters of the status quo.

Gender and development advocates have also placed women’s voice and agency at the heart of the struggle for gender equality, defining agency as the ability to recognize social injustices and to act/speak out against it (Kabeer, 1999). With the guidance of development “experts,” women in the Global South were encouraged to become change agents for achieving gender equality, framed within the assumptions of neoliberal modernity/development. The focus has been on mainstreaming gender into existing power structures in the belief this would transform gender relations and ensure gender equality (Madhok and Rai, 2012; Parpart, 2014). Men become development subjects when they transgress laws, infect women with HIV/AIDS or fail at school and work, yet the practices that maintain gender hierarchies and masculine dominance have largely been ignored (Cornwall, Edstrom and Greig, 2011). Development agencies have turned to women and girls for answers, claiming “girl power” as the new “solution” to gender inequality and underdevelopment (Radcliffe, 2015).

Yet, feminist postcolonial and de-colonial scholars have raised serious questions about this binary approach to attaining gender equality. As Mahmood points out, the focus on the “political and moral autonomy of the subject in the face of power … sharply limits our ability to understand and interrogate the lives of women whose desire, affect and will have been shaped by non-liberal traditions” (2001, 203). She calls for a new approach, one that defines “agency not as a synonym for resistance to relations of domination, but as a capacity for action that historically specific relations of subordination enable and create” (2001, 203). She challenges the assumption that gender equality should be defined within the worldview of the Global North and suggests that the question should be “how one would imagine the politics of gender equality when situated within particular life worlds, rather than speak from a position of knowledge that already knows what the undoing of inequality would entail” (Mahmood, 2001, 224; 2005).

This more nuanced, grounded approach to gender equality and feminist activism provides important insights into the many ways gender relations are understood and lived around the world. For example, many African feminists, while committed to improving gender equality, reject Western feminists’ preoccupation with struggles against patriarchal privilege, arguing that African approaches, often labeled as “Womanism,” balance “gender equality and traditional values such as Ubuntu (the interconnectedness of each human being, consensus-building and social solidarity, with particular attention to alliances against racism and imperialism” (Hudson, 2010, 258). Mahmood’s (2005) study of the Pietist movement in Egypt demonstrates how women working within the movement have achieved respect, theological knowledge and embodied power through attention to religious practices, modesty and silences as well as voice in a fundamentally patriarchal institution. Lee (2009) argues that Chinese women’s strategies for gaining respect and agency through managing “proper” gendered practices within family structures, challenges the assumption that direct confrontation is the only (or best) way to achieve gender equality. Keith Basso (1970) discovered that among the Western Apache, the choice between voice and silence depended on people’s relationships as silence was deeply embedded in interpersonal relations. In her work on the “birongona” women of the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, Bina D’Costa has argued that strategic silence was deployed by the state to exclude women who were sexual violence survivors; these women also used silence as a “negotiated survival strategy” in a highly patriarchal context where traditional gender norms were upheld (2011, 79–80). Swati Parashar (2010; 2014) has engaged with silence as speech and silences produced by speeches in her work on women militants and right-wing vigilantes in South Asia. Writings on indigenous women in Africa, Latin America and Australia have also emphasized the comfort levels with the subversive power of silence (see Toppo and Parashar, Chapter 9, this volume; Gatwiri and Karanja, 2016; Green, 2007; Kolawole, 1997).

The growing postcolonial scholarship highlights the fact that gender relations and practices are deeply embedded in cultural, economic and political institutions and cannot simply be read off models framed within liberal/neo-liberal assumptions about gender equality. While feminist scholarship and activism certainly requires that close attention be paid to gender inequality and patriarchal forces at work around the world, feminist strategies also have to be situated within local gendered understandings and practices. This approach requires attention to local definitions of gender, gender relations, femininities and masculinities as well as an interrogation of patriarchal power and the forces that reinforce or inhibit possibilities for achieving greater gender equality and security. It also requires a more nuanced, grounded understanding of silence as a key method for dealing with complex, difficult and often dangerous circumstances.

Understanding silence in the postcolonial world

In the 1830s, Angelina Grimke was condemned for writing and speaking in public against racism, slavery and women’s inequality in the United States. Two men even challenged her to a debate over women’s right to a public voice, which she won handily. Nevertheless, Angelina and her sister Sarah (a noted anti-slavery author) were vilified for both their politics and their public speeches and writings (Berkin and Norton, 1979; Zaeshe, 1995). European women’s rights advocates endured similar critiques (Olsen, 1978). Thus, it is not surprising that the ability to speak out publicly on issues that mattered to women became a central pillar of the early feminist movements in North America and Europe. The ability to speak, through writing as well as speech, especially in male-dominated public spaces and on controversial subjects, continues to be seen as a crucial litmus test of feminist agency by many feminists around the world, including gender and development experts (Madhok and Rai, 2012).

In contrast, women’s silence has often been associated with disempowerment and lack of agency. As Cecile Jackson points out, “social justice and well-being indicators depend on “voice” in public life, and notions of power generally equate speech with power and silence with weakness” (2012, 1000). When silence is used as a verb, as in “to silence” or “to be silenced,” a person who is silenced, who cannot say what is on their mind or speak out against injustice, can quite rightly be seen as lacking agency. Indeed, much Western scholarship has regarded silence and speech as polar opposites. Silence has been largely seen as “the background or field that frames speech” (Acheson, 2008, 536). Yet, when we move beyond the binary that defines voice as agency and silence as disempowerment, the possibility for more complicated understandings of silence, voice and agency emerge. Silence can be a gesture, a form of communication, as powerful in many ways as speech (Acheson, 2008). It can be a source of comfort and reassurance, as well as a site for strategizing and resistance. These possibilities are particularly relevant when the complexities of an increasingly interconnected and unequal world are brought into the discussion (Agathangelou and Ling, 2009; Malhotra and Rowe, 2013).

At the most basic level, silence can be a coping mechanism, a choice, an action that can help deal with toxic and often dangerous situations. As Glenn points out, silence is not a meaningless void, it is a choice; it is what she calls “the deliberately unspoken” (2004, 536). Silence is often seen as a void, as an absence that is the polar opposite of speech. Yet, it can often serve as a refuge against danger, a site for contemplation and a source of healing. Parpart (2010a) argues, in the face of threats, silence can provide some room for agency as it enables “victims” to decide what they can say and what should remain unsaid. This choice can sometimes be life-saving. Indeed, Zarkov (2001) discovered that during the Balkan conflict, many females (and some males), denied they had been raped, using silence as a way of coping in a world that judged rape victims harshly. Silence can also help people to survive and resist the oppressive discourses and apparatuses structuring their lives (Palmer-Mehta and Haliliuc, 2011, 112). Thus silence can be an essential survival strategy, a source of comfort and a crucial mechanism for dealing with hostile and often dangerous environments.

Yet silence can be more than simply coping; it can create a space for reflection, for healing and for rethinking one’s position, values and identity. As an informant told Elena Stone:

There is a silence in which you have no voice, but there is also a silence in which you have chosen not to express your voice…. That’s a nice place … it’s a place of freedom, ultimate and total freedom – so much that it is a much more spacious voice.

(Stone, 2002, 35)

Silence can also provide a space for seeking the internal guidance and calm necessary for making intelligent choices at an appropriate time. It can be a place of refuge, a time for oneself, a site where competing voices can be pushed away and new dreams and visions are born (Lorde, 1984, 36–37). Silence can also become an integral part of life, woven into religious and social institutions in deeply meaningful and helpful ways (Urban-Mead, 2015; Mahmood, 2005). Indeed, Max Picard (1888–1965) regarded silence as spiritual rather than material, arguing that “there is more help and healing in silence than in all the ‘useful things’ ” (1952, 19). Buddhists have long used silent meditation as a path to reflection and peace (Wang, 2001). Others agree, arguing that silence can create a transformative space, a site providing precious time and solitude, for gathering one’s thoughts, thinking in new ways and developing inner strength (Kenny, 2011).

Silence can also be a platform for strategizing and organizing resistance to oppression. It can provide the mental and physical space to think calmly and critically, and to develop strategies for challenging oppressive forces (Ferguson, 2002; Clair, 1998). As Adrienne Rich points out, “Silence can be a plan/rigorously executed…. Do not confuse it/with any kind of absence” (1978, 5).¹ As Glenn reminds us, “silence can be a specifically feminist rhetorical act, often one of resistance” (2002, 262). She cites Anita Hill’s decision to remai...