Silence, Feminism, Power

Reflections at the Edges of Sound

S. Malhotra, A. Carillo Rowe, S. Malhotra, A. Carillo Rowe, Kenneth A. Loparo, S. Malhotra, A. Carillo Rowe, Aimee Carillo Rowe

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137002372
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

An interrogation of the often-unexamined assumption that silence is oppressive, to consider the multiple possibilities silence enables. The volume features diverse feminist reflections on the nuanced relationship between silence and voice to foreground the creative, meditative, generative and resistive power our silences engender.

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Still the Silence: Feminist Reflections at the Edges of Sound

Aimee Carrillo Rowe and Sheena Malhotra

Reflections on silence

This book provides a series of reflections on the paradoxes and transformative possibilities of silence. Our title, Silence, Feminism, Power: Reflections at the Edges of Sound, evokes the paradoxical relationship between sound and silence that is obscured when we assume an equation between voice and agency, and its inverse equation—silence and oppression. Our impulse is to challenge the binaristic relationship that has been assigned since antiquity to voice vis-à-vis silence. We seek to break with the Western tradition, reiterated from Aristotle to Audre Lorde, that locates silence as a site of reform and privileges voice as the ultimate goal of and means to achieve empowerment. If one of the major interventions we have inherited from Lorde (1984b) is that the “master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (110), our work seeks out new tools of speaking, listening, and wading into the fullness of silence.

The articulation between silence and powerlessness is almost common sense within Western culture, an assumption that is reified across literary, progressive academic, and activist contexts. Its equation presumes a political imperative: for an individual or group who is silenced to gain power, they must activate voice in order to resist and transform the conditions of their oppression. Sometimes an intermediary (a more powerful representative) can “speak for” the subaltern or marginalized classes.¹ The lacuna within this formulation is that the burden of social change is placed upon those least empowered to intervene in the conditions of their oppression. The figure of the subaltern gaining voice captures the political imaginary, shifting the focus away from the labor that might be demanded of those in positions of power to learn to listen to subaltern inscriptions—those modes of expression that are often interpreted as “silence.” This anthology interrupts this dynamic, providing a new imaginary for how the spaces between silence and voice might be traversed. It opens up space between transnational feminist work on subalternity and US third world feminist calls for women of color to come to voice. As such it functions as a bridge piece, joining women of color and their white allies—and various groups who are unevenly empowered—at the edges of sound.

Silence, Feminism, Power builds on the ironic relationship between voice, silence, and power to reveal the complexities that lie within these often-obscured interconnections. Authors engage questions like: What forms of resistance and healing does silence make possible? What nuances, strategic forms of engagement and ways of navigating or resisting power are made possible through silence? What alliances might be enabled as we learn to read silences? Under what conditions is it productive to move between voice and silence? How might the binaristic construction of voice and silence be reconfigured and with what political effects? What is silence?

Silence, Feminism, Power examines silence as a space of possibility. The authors argue that in entering the stillness of silence we might communicate deeply at the edges of sound. Silence allows us the space to breathe. It allows us the freedom of not having to exist constantly in reaction to what is said. Standing in silence allows for that breath, for that reflection that can create a space of great healing. We theorize silence as a space of fluidity, non-linearity, and as a sacred, internal space that provides a refuge—especially for nondominant peoples. Silence is a process that allows one to go within before one has to speak or act. This is crucial if our work as activists, writers, and creative artists is to come from a grounded place that connects the spiritual with the political.

In what follows we detail the various literature on silence and voice. We begin with a discussion of disciplinary and interdisciplinary treatments of silence, exploring the ways in which disciplinarity can enable, but also constrain, how silence is theorized. Next, we provide a more detailed account of feminist treatments of silence. Finally, we trace a genealogy of feminist treatments of silence as a political and intellectual point of departure for this volume.

Disciplinary and interdisciplinary treatments of silence

The authors featured here draw on a host of academic disciplines and interdisciplinary fields with a history of theorizing silence, primarily rhetoric and communication studies, postcolonial studies, anthropology, and critical pedagogy. This chapter traces a body of related research to excavate a genealogy of silence as it has emerged as an object of intellectual inquiry. It focuses primarily on critical and feminist perspectives, especially those critics and theorists who have examined the relationships between silence, voice, and power. We note the disciplinary frames in which silence has emerged and consider what’s gained and lost through previous discipline-based investigations of silence. We also consider the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to silences, like the one we employ in this volume.

While the literature on silence crosses various fields that are beyond the scope of the project at hand, we have limited our review of the literature to the disciplines from which the scholars and writers included here draw their insights and expertise. Silence, for instance, has a long tradition that is associated with Buddhist meditative practices. Buddhist practitioner Thich Nhat Hanh explains that silence is not an external but an internal state that is achieved through mindful living: “Silence comes from our heart and not from the absence of talk” (2009, p. 76). Silence has also been associated with yoga as a means to achieve deep reflection and meditation. Yogic practitioner Steven Cope describes the ways in which his energy shifts when he engages in “restraint” from speaking: “My energy is clear. It’s powerful. It’s focused, and quiet all at the same time” (Cope, 2006, p. 163). While many of our authors are inspired by the teachings of Buddhists like Thich Nhat Hanh and Pema Chodron and engage in yogic practices, the expansive scholarship that surrounds their texts is beyond the scope of this book.

Rhetoric and communication studies

The relationship between silence and voice has emerged as an important topic of investigation in the fields of rhetoric and communication studies. Heavily influenced by Western understandings of communication practices, voice has traditionally been elevated as a privileged object of study within these fields (Tannen and Saville-Troike, 1985). Deborah Tannen and Muriel Saville-Troike challenge traditional treatments of silence and voice, drawing on close readings of conversations to render silence as a “valid object of investigation, bounded by stretches of verbal material which provide boundary marking for its identification” (1985, p. 4). Their work seeks to provide a fuller description of communication processes that are erased through the assumption that silence is absence. In her essay “Silence: Anything But,” Tannen² (1985) employs conversational analysis to demarcate the distinction between a conversational pause and a silence. She finds that a pause tips into a silence when it is “too long,” thus while silence “communicates” for Tannen, it remains negatively valenced within her analysis.

Feminist communication studies scholars such as Karlyn Kohrs Campbell (1989), Lana F. Rakow and Laura A. Wackwitz (2005), and Karen and Sonja Foss (1991) have undertaken important work to uncover women’s silences and the patriarchal conditions that produce them, as well as the vital ways in which women leverage voice to resist silence. Campbell (1989) has worked over the long trajectory of her career to recover women’s rhetoric by tracing the history of early women’s rights movement that focused primarily on women’s suffrage. While vital to the field of feminist rhetoric, her work remains bound within a frame that valorizes voice against a backdrop of silence, in which silence is equated with oppression. The work of Rakow and Wackwitz is compelled by this tradition as well, exploring the ways in which “women are either denied access to communication forms … or admitted to them only to have their ideas dismissed out of hand as deviant or irrelevant.” Silence for Rakow and Wackwitz is a devastating condition of women’s lives to be overcome, for “to have voice is to possess both the opportunity to speak and the respect to be heard” (2005, p. 9). Karen A. Foss and Sonja K. Foss (1991) expand the archive of what constitutes women’s voices, exploring the various ways in which women’s lives and their art becomes acts of “speaking.” Centering women as communicators, their project explores the “eloquence” of women’s lives in diverse forms of expression: gardening, graffiti, jewelry design, motherhood, needlework, painting, quilting, photography, and rituals.

Other communication studies scholars have begun to question the equation of silence with absence. Robin Clair and Kris Acheson, whose current work on silences is featured in this volume (chapters 6 and 14), have been at the forefront of this intervention, pushing the field to rethink the assumption that silence is somehow opposed to and distinct from communication. In her important book Organizing Silence: A World of Possibilities (1998), Clair argues that silence is both an aesthetic and a political practice that can be traced to the origins of language. She believes that “exploring silence as a fundamental part of communication, culture and conflict may illuminate the complex nature of social relations” (1998, p. 4). Her work looks at the ways in which silence is structured into language and, by extension, “interests, issues, and identities of marginalized people,” who are “silenced and how those silenced voices can be heard” (Clair, 2012). Drawing on a rich archive of philosophical treatments of silences within communication, she excavates the often-overlooked silences that constitute language, institutions, and society. Her feminist treatment of silences situates silencing practices as embedded in and cross-cut by relations of power. In “Silence is a Gesture: Rethinking the Nature of Communicative Silences” (2008), Acheson argues that silence and speech are often defined as binaristically opposed to one another, obscuring the multiple meanings of silence as a form of human expression. Following the phenomenological work of Merleau-Ponty, Kris Acheson suggests that silence is “as like speech as it is different,” thus is a “gesture,” enacted by bodies in a physical world. This means, for Acheson, that silence is not secondary to expressed thought but rather is essential to embodied life.

Rhetoric and communication studies scholars have also focused on the relationship between silence, speaking, and listening. Krista Ratcliffe’s (2006) Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness argues that listening is under-examined in both pedagogy and communication theory, while Cheryl Glenn (2004) explores silence as a subordinated term within the rhetorical canon. Ratcliffe (2006) affirms the notion in her observation that “Listening is rarely theorized or taught” (2006, p. 18). She theorizes rhetorical listening as an interpretive invention, and as a code of cross-cultural conduct, as she points out the gendered and raced³ dimensions of listening, which is a function of power differentials in society, proposing rhetorical listening as a practice to bridge these gaps. Glenns’ project argues that silence is a “rhetorical art” that has been ignored in the rhetorical tradition due to the elevation of speech as a “gift of the gods” in ancient times (2004, p. 3). Alternately, she proposes that silence “reveals speech,” even as it “enacts its own sometimes complementary rhetoric” (2004, p. 3). Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence is an explicitly feminist project that underscores the importance of choice in assessing the quality of silence. Glenn’s opening lines signal the feminist impulse that drives the project as she observes the deeply gendered nature of silence that brought her to the writing: in her efforts to write women into the field of rhetoric, she observes “pockets of female rhetorical activity that punctuated those long stretches of silence” (2004, p. 1).

The work on silence in rhetoric and communication studies has been influenced by philosophical treatments of silence in communication. Clair credits Max Picard as being the first Western philosopher to offer “a full treatment of silence that asserts that speech and silence exist simultaneously” (1998, p. 25). Picard personifies silence, characterizing it as “always present” during human communication: “Silence is listening. That is what gives breath to a conversation” (1948, p. 25). Silence has a rhetorical force in Picard’s writing, a quasi-spiritual essence that “comes from afar” to “give words a new fullness” (1948, p. 25). While these works productively bring silence more fully into focus by challenging the epistemological conditions of its annihilation, they remain bound to Western and modernist assumptions about completeness of understanding. Our volume addresses this gap, providing perspectives on silence from a host of diverse positionalities and inter/disciplinary perspectives. As silences are embedded and performed in specific contexts, silence emerges in multiple manifestations in relation to voice and power.

Anthropology

Silences have also been taken up—as a marker or manifestation of cultural difference and as a category deployed to challenge power relations—in the field of anthropology. Keith Basso’s early work on silence within Western Apache culture (1970) was foundational to the theorizing of silence, voice, and culture in the field of anthropology and beyond. His linguistic studies explored the six conditions under which the Western Apache deployed silence: meeting strangers, early courting, children returning home after a long absence, encountering an angry person, and dealing with people in mourning or participants in healing ceremonies. His findings suggest that the Western Apache use silence in situations in which the social status of participants is ambiguous, unsettling expectations for social roles and thus deploying silence to respectfully allow for uncertainty to play out. Following Basso’s early mapping of Native American silences, Lawrence Gross has conducted a series of studies on the relationship between Anishinaabe uses of silence, open-mindedness, and senses of humor. “I see silence and humor as sharing an attitude of open-mindedness that allows the individual to experience the world as it is and to appreciate the world for what it is, complete with all the contradictions and incongruities that lead to humor,” he writes (2007, p. 70). He underscores the importance of silence to what he calls the “comic mind”: “the ability to observe the world keenly” (2007, p. 70). Gross is interested in the ways in which silence generates an “openness” of perception among Native Americans, which engenders the capacity to see oneself as flawed and stricken with contradictions—as fragmented, imperfect subjects who can laugh at these incongruities.

Maria-Luisa Achino-Loeb’s edited volume titled Silence: The Currency of Power argues that studying silence is central to understanding the more elusive aspects of power and identity within anthropological contexts as it enables us to “trust that our categories of experience are discrete, as opposed to arbitrary bindings of fluidity” (Achino-Loeb, 2005, p. 36). Because she situates practices of silence “at the heart of the very experience of any identity as a discrete entity,” (p. 3) silence becomes an active and dynamic host of practices that anthropologists might excavate to more deeply understand identity formation. Trinh T. Minh-Ha (1989) calls attention to the “suspension of language” as the precondition to knowing the other, a paradoxical voyage through which one arrives only to realize that she has never taken a step. As she poetically writes, “Silence ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Still the Silence: Feminist Reflections at the Edges of Sound
• Part I: Transformative Silences: Intersectionality, Privilege, Alliances
• Part II: Learning to Listen: Academia, Silence, Resistance
• Part III: Recovering Silences: Community, Family, Intimacy
• Part IV: Legacies of Silences: Memory, Healing, Power
• Index