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Questions of Silence: On the Emancipatory Limits of Voice and the Coloniality of Silence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 December 2019

Martina Ferrari Open the ORCID record for Martina Ferrari [Opens in a new window]
Martina Ferrari*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon, 211 Susan Campbell Hall, 1585 E 13th Ave, Eugene, Oregon97403
*
Corresponding author. Email: mferrar2@uoregon.edu
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Abstract

This article begins at a (historical) crossroads; it straddles the difficult ground between the recent public outcry against sexual violence (a protest that, as championed by the #MeToo movement, seeks to break the “culture of silence” surrounding sexual violence) and concerns about the coloniality of voice made visible by the recent decolonial turn within feminist theory (Ruiz 2006; Lugones 2007; Lugones 2010; Veronelli 2016). Wary of concepts such as “visibility” or “transparency”—principles that continue to inform the call to “break the silence” by “speaking up” central to Western liberatory movements—in this article, I return to silence, laying the groundwork for the exploration of what a revised concept of silence could mean for the development of practices of cross-cultural communication that do not play into coloniality.

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Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 35 , Special Issue 1: Indigenizing and Decolonizing Feminist Philosophy , Winter 2020 , pp. 123 - 142
Copyright
Copyright © by Hypatia, Inc. 2019

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