Introduction
My current academic focus on silence as a form of power and the surrounding issues is largely the result of a discussion with Marysia Zalewski in the mid-1990s, at an International Studies Association meeting. An acrimonious debate over a passing remark by the sole male discussant on a gender and International Relation (IR) panel had raised serious questions about the gender imbalance on most feminist panels. To address this lacuna, we decided to organise a double panel on masculinities and gender at the next IR meeting. Placed on the last day of the conference in a popular resort town, we grimly predicted we would just be talking to each other. Instead, a large crowd arrived, and lively discussions ensued. Buoyed by the interest, we decided to produce an edited collection based on the panels. The success of The Man Question in International Relations inspired Rethinking the Man Question Footnote 1 ten years later. Both reflected an increasing interest in the roles of men, masculinities, and gender relations in international conflicts, policymaking, and power struggles.
Both books raised many questions, not only about men and masculinity, but also about how gender and gender relations of power relate to International Relations and Security Studies. Zalewski's introduction in the first volume set the stage for chapters that revealed the potential of this new and exciting approach. Charlotte Hooper explored masculinist practices and gender politics; Luke Ashworth and Larry Swatuk interrogated masculinity and the fear of emasculation in IR theory; Steve Niva explored new world order masculinity and the Gulf War; and Carol Cohn produced a path-breaking article on LGBTQI members of the military. All of the authors raised important debates and inspired further research on masculinity and power in IR. Rethinking the Man Question encouraged further investigations. Kimberly Hutchings explored how masculine language and assumptions have shaped IR scholarship, international policy, and politics. Kevin Dunn interrogated white privilege; Sandra Whitworth explored militarised masculinity and post-traumatic stress disorder – a subject with global implications. Dibyesh Anand investigated porno-nationalism and the male subject in India. Both volumes have inspired discussions and writings about men and masculinities in IR, particularly regarding security, political economy, and feminist analyses.
Marysia Zalewski and I continued to explore masculinity and IR with Penny Griffin in a special issue on ‘Men, Masculinity, and Responsibility’ in Men and Masculinities.Footnote 2 Zalewski has continued to write, both alone and with feminist allies, exploring feminist analysis and international relations, particularly militarisation, violence, race and terrorism; taking feminist violence seriously; and race and terror.Footnote 3 Her pioneering book, Feminist International Relations: Exquisite Corpse,Footnote 4 established a benchmark for interrogating the often fraught relationships between feminism(s) and International Relations in a complex, unpredictable, and often dangerous world.
Masculinity/ies, militarisation, and terror have continued to be ongoing priorities for Zalewski as well, inspiring new scholarship in both single authored and collaborative scholarship. A recent think piece on the concept of military masculinities in Critical Military Studies (2017) argues that this phrase has become too comfortable and familiar. Zalewski questions the stability of the term, calling for readers to abandon comfort for a more global, critical view of military masculinities.Footnote 5 The remarkable collection, Sexual Violence against Men in Global Politics, edited by Zalewski, Drumond, Prügl, and Stern, reflects Zalewski's commitment to high-quality intellectual teamwork. Indeed, her entire career has been shaped by this commitment.Footnote 6 Alone and with collegial co-authors, Zalewski has built a scholarly community that has produced remarkable, innovative publications.
Sexual Violence against Men revisits some of the issues raised by the Man Question books. The editors argue that sexual violence against men in conflict (both in war and peace) has been severely underestimated. In fact, it has often been seen as a sign of weakness that undermines male authority and the patriarchal status quo. The book calls for a deeper interrogation of this frequently silenced topic. The chapters focus on the long-term and more immediate harm sexual violence has caused for many men caught up in conflicts. They examine issues a range of issues, including sexual assaults against men in the military, sexual violence against men during the Peruvian civil war, and torture that includes sexual violence.
This scholarship coincides with my own concerns about masculinities, gender relations, and gender hierarchies in insecure sites.Footnote 7 Roisin Ryan-Flood and Rosalind Gill's groundbreaking book on silence and secrecy in the research process offered an opportunity for rethinking the role of silence in insecure sites.Footnote 8 My chapter, ‘Choosing Silence: Rethinking Voice, Agency and Women's Empowerment’,Footnote 9 argued that silence could be a form of protection, a useful tool when voice was either silenced or inoperative. Further reflections inspired a more nuanced approach to silence as a form of agency. I began to explore the possibility that silence was not simply about being silent or silenced; it could also be a form of power. My initial focus centred on women's utilisation of silence as a survival strategy and where possible, a source of power and influence. Lene Hansen's revolutionary discussion of the silent power of the Little Mermaid statue in Denmark inspired further reflection.Footnote 10 Some feminist scholars have also explored silence as a potentially powerful form of expression and action, particularly in insecure sites.Footnote 11
While the focus on men and masculinities has largely assumed male voice/power and underplayed the role of silence, broader considerations of masculine silences and their potential power have begun to emerge. Dubravka Zarkov discovered denials and silences by men who had been raped and tortured in the Yugoslavian conflicts.Footnote 12 Silence thus became a form of resistance as well as a coping mechanism. It could erase unwelcome stories and reinforce the normality of male power. Sophia Dingli,Footnote 13 in her discussion of silence and IR theory, calls for a deeper and broader understanding of silence, arguing that silence is always an important aspect of the theory and practice of international politics. She emphasises the power of male use/choice of both speech and silence. Xavier GuillaumeFootnote 14 expands the discussion of silence, challenging the common assumption that it is simply the absence of speech/voice. He regards silence not just as the absence of sound/voice/speech, that is, the opposite of speech. Rather, Guillaume argues that both verbal and non-verbal acts affect the way people understand themselves and each other, calling for greater attention to both silence and voice in security studies and International Relations. While nation states/and/or the powerful often define what silence means, he points out that silence can also destabilise the relations between the powerful and the less powerful, thus potentially challenging the established notions of hierarchy and power. Thus he presents a challenge for scholars interested in considering both the power and weakness of silence in a complicated postcolonial and gendered world.
Inspired by this scholarship, Swati Parashar and I joined some like-minded scholars keen to explore the role of silence, voice, and agency in contested arenas. Rethinking Silence, Voice and Agency in Contested Gendered Terrains Footnote 15 brought together scholars from around the world to explore the potential of silence in a troubled world. While acknowledging the importance of feminist (and masculine) struggles to gain public voice, we argue that silence is not simply a sign of weakness, nor is it dominated solely by masculine voices. The collection argues that in our increasingly global, postcolonial world, silence, as well as voice, has emerged as a tool of empowerment, not just for handling danger, but also for reconsidering one's situation, developing strategies for resistance and change, and challenging patriarchal and class privilege, oppression, and social injustice. Silence has become an alternative source of protection, power and action for many men and women – both individually and in groups. It has often been entwined with voice, but is powerful in its own right. Silence-in/behind voice also reveals silent meaning/power behind spoken words, enabling a deeper understanding of silence and voice, their complicated relationship, and the power of both in an often insecure and gendered world.
The chapters explore silence in many sites and forms, concluding that our increasingly global and complex world requires an understanding of both silence and voice. Writings on gender in the Global South are increasingly challenging Western liberal assumptions and complicating analyses of gender, silence/voice, and power around the world.Footnote 16 Rethinking Silence, Voice and Agency contributes to these debates, exploring the power of silence in a world where voice is too often seen as the ultimate sign of power. Zalewski's scholarship, both alone and with co-authors, raises crucial questions that speak to this broader discussion, particularly about male/masculine power and voice. The conversation has often focused on being silenced. I would like to invite a discussion that considers silence as potentially empowering, as well as disempowering, in an often conflicted, dangerous, unpredictable, and gendered world.
Reconsidering gender, silence, voice, and agency in a turbulent world
Mainstream liberal, Marxist, and radical feminists, as well as gender and development advocates, have generally 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 equal 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 deeply 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, has largely focused on challenging patriarchal power in order to achieve more gender equality.Footnote 17
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, often irrational, in need of protection and best suited for domestic life. Salvation was sought from revolutionary feminist heroines willing to stand up for women's rights and to speak out against patriarchal authorities and power structures.Footnote 18 This perspective reinforced the binary underpinnings of mainstream feminism, divided between vocal feminist warriors and complicit, often silent/silenced, supporters of the status quo.
Gender and development (GAD) advocates also placed women's voice and agency at the heart of the struggle for gender equality, defining agency as the ability to recognise social injustices and to act/speak out against it.Footnote 19 GAD experts encouraged women in the Global South to be change agents for gender equality, framed within the assumptions of neoliberal modernity/development. Mainstreaming gender became the new ‘solution’ for achieving gender equality.Footnote 20 Practices reinforcing gender hierarchies and masculine dominance have largely been ignored.Footnote 21 Development agencies have turned to women and girls for answers, claiming ‘girl power’ as the new ‘solution’ to gender inequality and underdevelopment.Footnote 22
Feminist postcolonial and de-colonial scholars have raised serious questions about this approach to attaining gender equality. As Saba 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’. She calls for a new approach 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’.Footnote 23 She suggests that gender policies should be framed by ‘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’.Footnote 24
This more nuanced, grounded approach to gender equality and feminist activism offers new insights into the many ways gender relations are understood and lived around the world. For example, many African feminists reject Western feminists’ preoccupation with struggles against patriarchal privilege, arguing that African approaches, often labelled 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.Footnote 25 Mahmood highlighted the power of Pietist women in Egypt who gained respect and theological knowledge, and embodied power through attention to religious practices, modesty, and silences, as well as voice, in a largely patriarchal institution. Lin-Lee Lee highlights Chinese women's strategies for gaining respect and agency through understanding the limits and possibilities for both silence and voice. Keith Basso explored the powerful role of silence so deeply embedded in Western Apache culture, shaping both interpersonal relations and social values.Footnote 26
Postcolonial scholarship argues that gender relations and practices are deeply embedded in cultural, economic, and political institutions and cannot simply be read off liberal/neoliberal assumptions about gender equality. They require close attention to local definitions of gender relations, an interrogation of patriarchal power and the forces that reinforce or inhibit gender equality and security, and a more nuanced, grounded understanding of silence as a means for dealing with complex, difficult, and often dangerous circumstances.
Understanding silence in a 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.Footnote 27 European women's rights advocates endured similar critiques. 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 out, through writing and speech, especially in male-dominated public spaces and on controversial subjects, has long been seen as a crucial litmus test of feminist agency.Footnote 28
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’.Footnote 29 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 regarded as ‘the background or field that frames speech’.Footnote 30 Yet, when we move beyond the binary defining 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. It also can be a source of comfort and reassurance, as well as a site for strategising and resistance. These possibilities are particularly relevant in our increasingly interconnected and unequal world.Footnote 31
At a basic level, silence can be a coping mechanism, a choice/action that can help resolve toxic and often dangerous situations. As Cheryl Glenn points out, silence is not a meaningless void, it is a choice; it is what she calls ‘the deliberately unspoken’.Footnote 32 Silence is often seen as a void or absence that is the polar opposite of speech. Yet, it can be a refuge from danger, a site for contemplation and a source of healing. In my paper, ‘Choosing Silence …’,Footnote 33 I argue that silence can provide room for agency in the face of threats as it enables ‘victims’ to choose between acceptable speech and the unsayable. This choice can be life saving. During the Balkan conflict, many females denied they had been raped, using silence as a way of coping in a world that judged rape victims harshly. Male victims were particularly determined to deny rape in order to protect their masculine status.Footnote 34 Silence often helped people to survive and resist ‘the oppressive discourses and apparatuses structuring their lives’.Footnote 35 Thus silence can be a crucial survival strategy, a source of comfort, and an effective mechanism for dealing with hostile and 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 recalled, ‘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.’Footnote 36 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, time for oneself, a site where competing voices can be pushed away and new dreams and visions are born.Footnote 37 Silence can become an integral part of life, woven into religious and social institutions in deeply meaningful and helpful ways.Footnote 38 Indeed, Max Picard regarded silence as spiritual rather than material, arguing that ‘there is more help and healing in silence than in all the “useful things”’.Footnote 39 The Buddhists have long used silent meditation as a path to reflection and peace.Footnote 40 Others argue that silence can create a transformative space, providing precious time and solitude for gathering one's thoughts, thinking in new ways and developing inner strength.Footnote 41
Silence can also be a platform for strategising and organising resistance to oppression. It can provide the mental and physical space to think calmly and critically, and to develop strategies for challenging oppressive forces.Footnote 42 As Adrienne Rich points out, ‘Silence can be a plan/rigorously executed …. Do not confuse it / with any kind of absence.’Footnote 43 Glenn reminds us that ‘silence can be a specifically feminist rhetorical act, often one of resistance’. She cites Anita Hill's decision to remain silent about Clarence Thomas's sexist behaviour towards her in the workplace, until he was nominated for the Supreme Court. Only then did she decide to speak publicly about his abusive behaviour. Her deliberate use of silence and voice demonstrates the power of both, reminding us that purposeful silence ‘resonates with meaning and intention – just like that of the spoken word’.Footnote 44 Many African American women have used silence to consolidate their internal resources and strategise in order ‘to cope with, and in most cases, transcend, the confines of race, class and gender oppression’.Footnote 45 Thus deliberate silence has often strengthened and reinforced resistance to injustice and harmful behaviour.
Collective embodied silence can also be very powerful. It can challenge oppressive regimes and social injustice. Some see it as a style of ‘speaking’,Footnote 46 but collective silence is at the core of this power. These silent vigils and protests occur in circumstances where direct, vocal challenges cannot succeed, and where silent vigils, symbols, and placards have proven effective weapons against tyranny. Using their authority as mothers, many women have found ways to publicly hold regimes accountable without speaking. In Argentina, the mothers of the disappeared (Madres de la Plaza de Mayo) gathered silently in the Plaza de Mayo, across from the presidential palace, where they walked silently round and round wearing white headscarves, symbolising the diapers of their lost children. Their numbers grew, and the vigils built awareness and gradually helped to bring down the government.Footnote 47 Women in Black, established by a small group of Israeli and Palestinian women soon after the first Palestinian Intifada in the 1980s, organised vigils once a week, at the same hour and at the same location: a major traffic intersection in Israel. The protestors dressed in black, holding up black signs of a hand with ‘Stop the Occupation’ written in white. Vigils soon sprang up throughout Israel and around the world, providing solace, shaping public opinion, and strengthening solidarity against injustices.Footnote 48 As Cynthia Cockburn reminisced, ‘there is something calming about vigiling, holding yourself in silence and stillness as city workers and tourists mill around you and the taxis and buses stream past. … What restores me as I stand there once again is the presence of other women at my shoulder … the carefully thought-out message we are trying to put across; and more than anything, the feeling that women are doing this in hundreds of similar vigils around the world.’Footnote 49 Men and the LGBTQI community have played important roles in these vigils as well.
Silence can also work with voice, not silence as the powerless ‘other’, but as another kind of power. The silence-in-voice, lurking behind spoken words, is often telling. These silences can provide powerful messages. They remind us that silence and voice are often interwoven; both are powerful, one spoken, the other unspoken. Around the world, women often speak less frequently than men in public arenas. This is often taken as proof of women's weakness; yet, it can be interpreted in different ways. The silences behind women's public speech can support male authority, but they can also be a strategic performance for ensuring family status, making claims and even expressing different conceptions of ‘proper’ gender relations.Footnote 50 Moreover, cultural contexts that value modesty and restraint for women in public may support a patriarchal system, while simultaneously offering women a sense of achievement and value.Footnote 51 Women's public voices and silences in markets, churches, courts, and informal public talk are also often ignored. Yet they can offer a very different picture of women's agency, such as Anna Tsing'sFootnote 52 research on the inventive, powerful creativity of women shamans in Kalimantan, Indonesia.
When women speak in public, or in private, they are often keenly aware of the dangers of speaking frankly and openly. Women, more marginal men, and the LGBTQI community living in conflict zones often deliberately edit their speech to avoid potential harm.Footnote 53 Many women live in societies where gender inequality requires judicious decisions about what should/should not be said.Footnote 54 Choosing when and where to speak (or not) can provide a sense of control for people living with violence and danger. Indeed, Rwandan genocide survivors regained some of their dignity by choosing when, how, and to whom they would tell their stories.Footnote 55 Yet the silences behind these stories also ‘speak’. They can provide clues to inner contemplation and struggles for managing both voice and silence. Attention to the silences behind voice as well as the voicing of silences demonstrates how they can work together, not as opposing forces of power, but as two different but interrelated forms of power, particularly in insecure sites.
The simple dichotomy between voice and silence is often complicated by performance as well. Indeed, Judith Butler claims silent performances can be a form of ‘speaking’ – not only as a challenge to patriarchal privilege, but also to reveal complex gender relations in different contexts.Footnote 56 Embodied resistances can surface/‘speak’ through performances critiquing power without words. Embodied silent performances can reveal the complexity of gendered practices.Footnote 57 They can also reveal the ways ‘silence realizes its potential for power and confronts authority’,Footnote 58 demonstrating the power of silent opposition, even against powerful opponents.
Silence, as well as voice, is best seen as a tool for operating in an increasingly transnational world, where local gendered practices are often complicated, patriarchal, and resilient. Moreover, our increasingly interconnected and mobile world places many people in complex and often difficult situations. Direct opposition is often impossible. For example, South African teenage women facing sexual demands that risk HIV infections have often sought ‘an accommodation with men's power whilst seeking to negotiate greater respect and non-violence within relations with men’.Footnote 59 Accommodation thus includes both adaptation and resistance. Chinese women often use both words and silences in order to have some leverage in a fundamentally patriarchal system.Footnote 60 The female (and some male) Pietists in Zimbabwe use both voice and silence to discipline their bodies, speech, and manner in order to achieve a desired form of spiritual life.Footnote 61 These examples demonstrate the importance of adopting a more grounded, open-minded, and nuanced approach to silence/voice, gender and power.
Exploring the power of silence in insecure sites: Concluding thoughts
While keenly aware that speaking out and naming oppressions and oppressors is critical for challenging injustice, the naturalised link between voice and agency privileges the ability to speak out against tyranny and injustice. Yet, this assumption is difficult to sustain in a volatile and insecure world where conflicts have often enabled gender-based violence against women, many men, and LGBTQ communities. In such a world, can we assume that masculinist privilege can be openly challenged only through ‘voice’? Do we need to consider other forms of voice/agency/empowerment? Can silence be more than simply disempowerment and lack of agency? Can silences, partial truths, and secrets provide a basis for developing survival strategies, reassessing possibilities and limitations for action and even organising to protect and/or challenge the status quo?
Rethinking Silence, Voice and Agency in Contested Gendered Terrains raises questions about how silence operates, particularly the capacity of silence, alone or alongside voice, to challenge gender oppression and enhance gender equality around the world. The authors adopt a broad lens to explore the various ways silence and voice are experienced and utilised in insecure and often dangerous sites, particularly in postcolonial contexts. Silence is often seen as a feminine weapon, but Rethinking Silence, Voice and Agency demonstrates the power of silence for men, particularly males in insecure positions/situations. Silence is indeed a weapon for both sexes, often used in different ways, but equally powerful. The writings of Marysia Zalewski and her co-authors also raise many important questions about the silences forced on people, especially in dangerous situations. They highlight the dangers of enforced silence in a neoliberal era of spectacular terror,Footnote 62 and worry about the erasure of sexuality in wartime rape, dissociating the ‘sexual’ from ‘violence’,Footnote 63 and other themes. Sexual Violence against Men in Global Politics Footnote 64 investigates the sexual violence committed against men in armed conflicts, revealing widespread violence against men in conflict settings around the world. These findings highlight the need for further research into the voices and silences required to handle difficult and dangerous situations.
Both volumes have much to offer and gain from these debates. Complicating silence enables greater understanding of both the power and limitations of silence in a world where silence is often a misunderstood, but powerful, force – both for good and evil. Silence also emerges as a tool that can be used by both men and women. Silent protests can make a difference. They can bring men and women together in a common search for a more equitable world. We look forward to bringing these perspectives together to explore the power and limitations of silence in difficult and dangerous circumstances. Both volumes have much to say about new epistemological, methodological, and empirical paths for understanding the power (and limitations) of silence. Moving beyond the silence/voice dichotomy enables a much-needed shift for navigating our gendered world of conflicts, contestations, and possibilities. We hope these parallel, and sometimes divergent, efforts to understand and utilise both silence and voice, can provide an effective platform for encouraging future research into gender, (in)security, and international relations in a complicated, postcolonial world.
