Rethinking silence, voice, gender and power in Latin American contexts

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Mainstream North American and European feminisms have long equated agency and liberation with women’s ability to speak out against injustice. Silence, on the other hand, has been associated with powerlessness, and the act of being silenced blamed for women’s failure to gain power in key political, economic and cultural institutions. In this panel, we challenge this binary framing of voice/silence and its attendant liberal, Western assumptions about gender equality and social change. Drawing on recent feminist postcolonial and decolonial rethinking of the equation between individual autonomy, voice and power, we examine the ways that silence can operate as a site for nurturing strength, empowerment, and resistance to oppression in Latin American contexts. The papers alternatively provide a conceptual understanding of the power of silence for challenging gender injustice in situations of growing insecurity; an account of resistance to the strategic silence of the Mexican state on feminicide; a discussion of how power and voice/silence could be reimagined in intrahousehold bargaining in Latin American contexts, a reframing of silence and empowerment in debates about cash transfer programs in Latin America, and a discussion of the myriad ways that women deploy silence as power in transnational households across the U.S/Mexico border. The panel offers ways to recognize activist strategies and agency outside of the Western frame, and provides a complex understanding of different kinds of silences and their potential to challenge gendered inequalities.

Sub Track

• Gender and Feminisms

Session Organizer

• Suzanne Bergeron, University of Michigan Dearborn

Chair

• Amy C Lind, University of Cincinnati

Discussant

• Amy C Lind, University of Cincinnati

Individual Presentations

• Rethinking the power of silence in insecure and gendered sites - Jane L Parpart, adjunct professor

• Feminicide in Mexico: Silence as a strategy of resistance - Monica Trujillo-Lopez, Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de Puebla (UPAEP)

• Rethinking gender, voice and empowerment in intrahousehold bargaining - Suzanne Bergeron, University of Michigan Dearborn

• Challenging the equation between voice and empowerment in transnational households - Marianne H Marchand, Universidad de las Américas Puebla

• Rethinking cash transfer programs in Latin America: Can beneficiary women empower through their silence? - Elena Ayala Galí