Speech, Gender and Power: Beyond Testimony

Cecile Jackson

ABSTRACT

This article aims to unsettle some taken-for-granted ideas about speech and
power, to argue against taking testimony ‘at face value’ without reflecting also
on silence, on the forms and techniques of talk, on embodied communication,
and on the complex ways in which interests are expressed and animated. It
argues that treating direct testimony in public political institutions as a metric
of gender inequality may be another example of the distortions that follow
from an uncritical adoption of an unmarked male template of speech as
universal standard. The article aims thereby to improve the way development
researchers ‘hear’, and how practitioners think about ‘participation’.

INTRODUCTION

In the recent protests in Cote d’Ivoire, hundreds of women expressed their

support for democratically elected Outtara, with banners reading ‘Don’t
Shoot Us’, but also through their nakedness (The Guardian, 2011). This
kind of protest is a long-standing phenomenon among women in sub-Saharan
Africa, and endures into contemporary politics.1 Here questions are explored
of how subalterns may ‘speak’, within a broad framework which includes
not only talk and testimony but also silence and embodied communication.
Questions of power in gender relations and empowerment initiatives in
development practice turn on implicit and explicit expectations of speech,
which deserve scrutiny. In development studies, compliance and resistance
have been examined much more through what is said, and the puzzles over
meanings, rather than how it is said, including gesture and what Goffman
(1964: 133) calls the ‘greasy parts of speech’. But the ‘how’ of speech matters
for the conceptualization of resistance and subjectivities; for epistemologies

The author wishes to thank the anonymous referees of this journal for their valuable comments
on an earlier version of this paper.
1. Over 300 naked Kenyan women drove research scientists from a nature reserve to protest
the possible extension of the reserve (BBC 7, Feb 2001); large numbers of women protested
naked over rigged local elections in Ado-Ekiti, Nigeria, 2007, and in the same year Liberian
women protested naked against repatriation from Ghana and were arrested, since Ghanain
Interior Minister Kwamena Bartels said that ‘When women strip themselves naked and
stand by a major highway, that is not a peaceful demonstration’ (BBC News, 18 March
2008).
Development and Change 00(0): 1–25. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7660.2012.01791.x

C 2012 International Institute of Social Studies.

Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and
350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA
2 Cecile Jackson

and the conduct of research and improved ‘hearing’ by researchers; and for
the pragmatics of participatory development, which has centred on particular
kinds of ‘talk’ in particular contexts.
In the early years of gender analysis of development, women in devel-
opment (WID) approaches were criticized for their naı̈ve idea that simply
‘including’ women in development would be the solution to gender-blind
development efforts, or what was called an ‘add women and stir’ approach.
Later gender and development (GAD) analysts pointed out that women were
already ‘included’, but in particular, subordinated ways that required re-
theorizing, and a distinctive approach in policy and politics. Similarly now,
in relation to speech, a speech deficit model, of silent and excluded women,
is inadequate. Women are already participating, but in neglected contexts;
they have power as listeners in many participation roles, and as speakers in
multiple registers and production formats through which they embed, unset-
tle and resignify language. The challenge for researchers, and development
practitioners, is to improve their ability to listen and hear.

Social Justice and Speech

Social inequalities are widely assumed to be based on speech deficits: speech-

based participation is the sine qua non of progressive change, social justice
and well-being indicators depend on ‘voice’ in public life,2 and notions of
power generally equate speech with power and silence with weakness. The
modus operandi of participation is focus groups, consultations, user groups
and so on, and similarly the social inclusion agenda is implemented by
building voice through talk and testimony. For gender equity in develop-
ment, voice, in its multiple meanings, has particular prominence. At macro
levels, the Gender Empowerment Measure of the UNDP is based partly
on the number of women in parliament and political life. In micro-models
of power within households, well-being outcomes depend on implicit and
explicit bargaining. Rights-based development depends on disadvantaged
groups articulating their demands to convert legal entitlements into actuali-
ties. Speech is held to express subjectivities, and for the Truth and Reconcil-
iation Commission in South Africa, what is assumed is an ‘equation of the
speaking self with the healed self’ (Ross, 2003: 327). Finally, social justice
research epistemologies rest overwhelmingly on testimony as evidence.
Whilst the participatory turn in development practice has been much de-
bated (Cleaver, 1999; Cooke and Kothari, 2001) and revised (Cornwall,
2002), the critique has centred largely on whose interests are actually repre-
sented, who speaks and what representation claims are made. What is not, on

2. Voice, in development studies, refers to both the expression of identity and to political
representation, related but distinct ideas.
Speech, Gender and Power 3

the whole, questioned is that voice in public speech events is foundational

for progressive social change, and that silence equates to subordination.
There has been very little consideration of the dualism in social science
which equates speech with power, and silence with weakness. Talk is the
way in which interests are defined, defended and demanded. In feminist
theorizing too, the subordination of women has been firmly tethered to their
lesser ability to ‘speak’. This is not to argue that women’s participation in
public speech events is unimportant. However, treating direct testimony in
public political institutions as a metric of gender (in)equality may be another
example of the distortions that follow from an uncritical adoption of an
unmarked male template — in this case regarding speech — as a universal
standard.
Jane Parpart and Naila Kabeer have recently debated voice, agency and
empowerment. The former asks ‘Can silences and secrecy be legitimate and
even empowering strategies for dealing with difficult situations?’ and argues
that voicing dissent ‘in an increasingly dangerous world’ can be suicidal
(Parpart, 2010: 1). Kabeer clarifies her view that ‘voice’ is not necessarily
speech, and that silence can ‘speak’ (Kabeer, 2010: 18). Both these positions
suggest a closer and crisper focus on speech, which does not collapse it into
a synonym for ‘voice’, and this is what is intended here. Women’s narratives
of empowerment occupy an important place in debates about empowerment
(Kabeer, 2011), yet there is little discussion in development literatures about
just how women talk empowerment, or how the capacity for such narratives
is historically and culturally specific. Or, indeed, about how power resides in
their silences. These questions are important to debates about participation,
empowerment and development research epistemologies.
Political subjectification, through testimony representations, constitutes
another argument for a more critical look at speech than has been the case
in development studies. Development policy, broadly, is now commonly
legitimated through claims to reflect the expressed views and perspectives
of the poor, e.g. the World Bank in its ‘Voices of the Poor’ books, claims to
have tapped the authentic voices of the poor through their testimonies. The
broad idea of demand-led development turns on an expectation of speech of
a certain kind. Development actors frequently ‘animate’ words they claim
to be voiced by women. In this regard, Fassin (2008: 537) argues that
‘wherever victims of violence and inequality are supposedly deprived of
the power to express themselves, international organizations that defend
their cause decide to speak on their behalf’. In globalized media space,
humanitarian actors set themselves up as witnesses and spokespersons, and
‘speak in the name of those who are deemed not to have access to the
pubic arena: they literally speaks (sic) their words for them. In doing so
they illuminate, transform, and simplify these words, dramatise them in line
with their objective, which is not so much to reconstitute an experience as
to construct a cause’ (ibid.: 553). Women’s purported voicelessness allows
4 Cecile Jackson

their subjectivity to be more easily politically constructed by others, for both

good and ill.
How much does this ventriloquizing of women matter? Butler (1997: 2)
articulates the tension here; subjectification entails ‘precisely. . . this funda-
mental dependency on a discourse we never chose but that, paradoxically,
initiates and sustains our agency’. The paradox is that the discourse of
women’s empowerment both produces a form of subjectification (in the idea
of women as powerless victims) and also enables political opportunities
for them. Recognizing these subjectifications, through questioning how talk
becomes testimony, reveals disjunctions between speech and power.
In what follows, the focus is less on speech content, and more on how and
where the subaltern speaks. It is, of course, artificial to separate out form and
context from content (Gal, 1991: 192), but this is done in an attempt to correct
the over-emphasis that gender analysis of development places on content.
Listening more carefully to the many different ways and places in which
women communicate is important for a better grasp of power relations and
empowerment assumptions. In the next section I briefly outline the findings
of sociolinguistics on gender categories and talk, which emphasizes context,
plurality of speech registers, and the contingency of the exercise of power in
talk. This invites reconsideration of assumptions about silence and power,
and shows the need for ways to think about context and kinds of involvement
in talking and hearing.

DO TECHNIQUES OF TALK DISEMPOWER WOMEN?

What do gender differences in kinds of talk, and silences, amount to, and do
conversational methods and styles express gender relations of dominance?
A large body of (mostly western) research suggests that men talk, overall,
more than women, but context is very significant: women college students
talk more in classes taught by women than those taught by men, and men take
longer turns at talking than women in mixed groups (James and Drakich,
1993), but not in same-sex situations (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 2003:
115). Western men interrupt more frequently than women, but overlaps
in speech have a range of meanings, sometimes being supportive, or a
joint performance; turn-taking in conversation is culturally varied, and talk
overlaps are experienced in diverse ways by speakers (Tannen, 1994: 59).
The western evidence for gendered interactional styles is also clear, e.g. that
women are less competitive conversationalists than men, and generally speak
more indirectly, although boys are actually more indirect when talking about
personal problems. Indirectness can also reflect power and status, where
indirect styles are seen as more refined than artless direct speech (ibid.: 85).
In summarizing research on gender differences in (western) speech, Freed
emphasizes context, pointing out that differences are situation-specific:
Speech, Gender and Power 5

[T]he amount of talk, the structure of narratives, the use of questions, the availability of
cooperative and competitive speech styles, the employment of prestige speech forms, the use
of intimate friendly talk, . . . the occurrence of vernacular speech forms, lexical choices, the
use of silence, interruption, aggravated forms of address, and forms of politeness . . . do not
correlate in any consistent pattern with either sex or gender. (Freed, 2003: 705, emphasis in
the original)

Gender variations are very frequently found, but the content and direction
of these indicate little ground for generalization about women/men as cat-
egories which produce interaction styles independent of a wide variety of
contextual factors. Nor are particular techniques consistently associated with
power, and of this large body of (mostly western) research Tannen (1994:
2) concludes that ‘One cannot locate the source of women’s powerless-
ness in such linguistic strategies as indirectness, taciturnity, silence and tag
questions . . . . [since] the same linguistic means can be used for different,
even opposite, purposes and can have different, and even opposite, effects
in different contexts’ (emphasis in original). Particular techniques of talk
are not themselves imbued with more or less power; everything depends on
context. Western gender differences in talk do not show a systematic deficit,
a silencing of women, but they do show significant gender differences, and
the importance of context.

Words, Subjectivities and Agency:3 Speaking under Patriarchy

Women’s exclusion from ‘voice’ in public life is a taken-for-granted prob-

lem, seen to both reflect and reinforce patriarchy. Debate focuses on what
they say, what it means, and on ‘false consciousness’ since women’s words
often appear to be insensible of, or indifferent to, subordination. Are women
brainwashed, gagged or ‘speaking’ otherwise? Whilst a punishing patriarchy
may explain some silence (Parpart, 2010) it leaves a lot unexplained. The
puzzle is why women are silent, and/or why, when they do speak, they
often do not say what might be expected. Those who argue for a differ-
ent, if not false, consciousness include Ardener (1975), for whom women
are alienated from hegemonic language, as a consequence of their sub-
altern position; Sen (1990), for whom women have a deficit of perceived
self-interest constraining their ability to conceptualize their individual well-
being; and Gilligan (1982), who, more positively, writes that ‘in the different
voice of women lies the truth of an ethic of care, the tie between relation-
ship and responsibility’ (ibid.: 173). Against these, Agarwal (1994) and
Kandiyoti (1998) dispute the false consciousness argument. But whether
women are gagged by fear (Parpart, 2010), by the terms of a ‘patriarchal bar-
gain’ (Kandiyoti, 1988) or the foreclosures of the unspeakable (Butler, 1997),

3. By agency here I simply mean the capacity to express ideas, and act, with a degree of
independence from constraining social structures and norms.
6 Cecile Jackson

their relationship to speech, and expression of their interests, is marked by

the nature of prevailing gender orders. One thing is certain; testimony for
any subaltern group is more problematic to interpret. When women appear
not to recognize their own interests it may reflect observer misunderstand-
ings of those interests, or their words may be patriarchal mystifications, or
authentic expressions of a different personhood and patiency (Reader, 2007),
or a performance of culturally approved abjection. Then again, a symbolic
principle of gender hierarchy is not necessarily expressed linguistically,
but expressed and resisted through bodily praxis — and our insistence on
seeing women’s silences on subordination as ‘false consciousness’ is a con-
sequence of how we privilege speech and ignore the agency of the body
(Moore, 1999: 14).
Another way to approach women’s talk and silences may lie in considering
not how women’s words express their (self)consciousness, which implies
that gender is a fixed identity, with a given relationship to language, but rather
how discursive practices, and bodily praxis, are social processes through
which persons become male and female, and thus constitutive of gender
(Butler, 1997; Kulick, 1993; Strathern, 1988). For this we need to look at
discursive practices more closely.
We also need to question the foundational prominence given to
speech in conceptualizing women’s subjectivities and their gender re-
lations. Reader argues that agency (and voice) is over-emphasized
in western ideas of persons, and Butler too questions the extent to
which speech has the power to constitute the subject. She argues that
we equate speech and power because we consider speech to produce
conduct:

The effort to guarantee a kind of efficacious speaking in which intentions materialize in the
deeds they have ‘in mind’, and interpretations are controlled in advance by intention itself,
constitutes a wishful effort to return to a sovereign picture of language that is no longer true,
and that might never have been true, one that, for political reasons, one might rejoice over
never being true. That the utterance can be turned, untethered from its origin, is one way to
shift the locus of authority in relation to the utterance. (Butler, 1997: 93)

Her argument is that if (hate) speech is treated as equivalent to (hate) ac-

tion then opposition through legal, formal means is implied, but if it is not,
then it lends ‘support for the role of nonjuridical forms of opposition, ways
of restaging and resignifying speech in contexts that exceed those deter-
mined by the courts’ (ibid.: 23). In other words, it is the ambiguities, the
uncontrollability, and the impossibility of efficacious speech that limits the
power of speech to form subjectivities and to deliver predictable action.
We may then be over-concerned about women’s silences, and misunder-
standing what seems to be their acceptance of subordination. We generally
don’t know what kinds of untetherings, reframing and resignifying is go-
ing on in speech events, for which Goffman’s ideas offer a useful way
forward.
Speech, Gender and Power 7

Participation Frameworks and Gender

Goffman (1981) uses the terms ‘production format’ to refer to different ways
in which a speaker manages her speaking, ‘participation status’ to refer to the
relation of any one person in a gathering to an utterance, and ‘participation
framework’ to refer to the relation of all the persons present to that moment
of speech (ibid.: 137). Taken together these give the basis for analysing
changes in ‘footing’, the way speakers and listeners are constantly changing
their posture and stance, and their alignment to the talk. For speakers this
usually involves code switching (such as between dialects, or registers), or
sound markers like pitch, volume and tone. ‘A change in footing implies
a change in the alignment we take up to ourselves and others present as
expressed in the way we manage the production or reception of an utterance’
(ibid.: 128). This is an embodied interaction, in which, for example, sight
plays an important role through eye contact and displays of attention or
inattention.
The production format for speakers offers a number of roles. The ‘anima-
tor’ is the role of making the utterance, the ‘author’ is the person who has
selected the ideas being expressed, the words being used and how they are
spoken. The ‘principal’ is the role of someone ‘whose position is established
by the words that are spoken, someone whose beliefs have been told, some-
one who is committed to what the words say’ (ibid.: 144), often representing
an office, or collective interests. These distinctions are especially relevant
in relation to women’s speech as they offer a richer conceptualization of
the ways in which gender interests may be expressed, i.e. where and how
women may, as principals, influence the content of the speech of others;
as authors, shape the form of expression; or as animators, simply utter the
words of others. This has two advantages: it raises the issue of which speech
roles are available or unavailable to women, and for any particular research
approach, it offers an heuristic device for interpreting the connections and
disconnections between authorship and utterance.
It also serves to qualify the silences of women, rather than generalizing
from one production format to a speech deficit in general (see Ardener
below). Life histories, for example, are a production format which supposes
a speaker’s capacity to narrate the self in a chronological manner for an
audience of others, to link the self to the social, and show the unfolding of a
life. Keesing (1985: 31) analyses how Kwaio women changed over twenty
years from a ‘muted’ manner, uncomfortable with this production format and
unable to give narrative self-accounts of themselves, to one in which they
became ‘articulate raconteuses, wise observers of their social worlds, and
ideologues at least as forceful and voluble as their male counterparts’, as they
learned how to objectify and articulate their lives in post-colonial contexts
where the chronicling and codifying of custom had become symbolically and
politically important. Empowerment? Perhaps, but also history and changing
ways of speaking.
8 Cecile Jackson

Participant roles do not neatly divide speakers and hearers; they exist
in interactive relationships, and include a range of different kinds of lis-
teners. Some listeners are ‘ratified’ recognized participants, and others are
eavesdroppers and bystanders, who may display disinterest or inattention
to suggest that they are not there. Thus only some hearers are addressed.
There may also be strands of dominant communication and subordinate
communication — openly communicated in ‘byplay’ between some rati-
fied participants, ‘crossplay’ between ratified participants and bystanders,
and ‘sideplay’ — whispered talk between bystanders. And these may take
concealed forms (collusive byplay by those within the encounter, collusive
crossplay, by those both inside and outside the encounter, and collusive
sideplay, by those entirely outside the encounter) by speaking quietly, using
words with double meanings and so on (Goffman, 1981: 134).
An example of a participation framework is the platform monologue,
a lecture, sermon, or formal speech. Listeners here expect to examine a
speaker more openly than in conversation, but they may not have the right
to speak, and orators have audiences, not co-conversationalists. Podium
events thus have a specific ‘participation framework’. These are privileged
in development studies, whilst other participation formats are neglected.
Goffman also points out, pace feminist debates about false consciousness,
speech and subjectivity, that much of what is said is not a direct expression
of subjectivity. ‘Often when we . . . engage in “fresh talk”, that is, the extem-
poraneous, ongoing formulation of a text under the exigency of immediate
response to our current situation, it is not true to say that we always speak
our own words and ourself take the position to which these words attest’
(Goffman, 1981: 146). Switches in production formats which alter footing,
e.g. when we switch from saying something ourselves to saying something
someone else said, what he calls ‘embedding’, open endless creative possi-
bilities in participation frameworks. And when we talk about ourselves as
‘I’ we create a character in a world which is ‘spoken about’. By this means
we can complexify our speaking (I wish, I think), or distance ourselves by
referring to ourselves in the past, or talk about what someone else did or
said, i.e. we can embed a different character/speaker into our speech.
Storytelling requires a substantial embedding of characters and the inter-
mittent removal of the speaker. Other embeddings are seen in how animators
give the words of others a particular spin — irony, mockery, stereotyping
— or use an adage to introduce a wider authority. And we routinely ‘rit-
ualise participation frameworks; that is, we self-consciously transplant the
participation arrangement that is natural in one social situation into an inter-
actional environment in which it isn’t . . . We not only embed utterances, we
embed interaction arrangements’ (ibid.: 153). We do so such that speech
is ultimately a complexly laminated process of footing changes, and ‘as
dramatists can put any world on their stage, so we can enact any partici-
pation framework and production format in our conversation’ (ibid.: 155).
Similarly, Butler (1997: 147) holds that speech performance may resignify
Speech, Gender and Power 9

a ritual, breaking with the original context and assuming meanings which
were never intended, and ‘the speech act [can be] an insurrectionary act’
(ibid.: 160).
These distinctions are especially relevant in relation to women’s speech as
they offer a richer conceptualization of the ways in which gender identities
and interests may be developed and expressed. That is, where and how
women may, as principals, influence the content of the speech of others,
as authors, shape the form of expression, or as animators, simply utter the
words of others. Goffman’s ideas transcend the speech/silence dualism and
give analytical substance to the roles and powers of listeners, they show the
opportunities for creative resistance in speaking and hearing, and they hold
open the question of the connections and disconnections between authorship
and utterance, subjectivity and speech.
Rather than seeing women’s relation to language and speech as a problem
of deficit and exclusion, as a consequence of their subordination, the next
section looks at ways of talking and hearing for how they invoke, perform
and contest gender relations, and as processes which come to constitute what
it is to be a woman or a man. In doing so, the spaces and registers which
women find for revisions of gender relations may become clearer.

RECONSIDERING SPEECH AND POWER

Deference and Multiple Registers

Public speech is more marked by women’s deference to men than private

speech is, for male prestige and successful masculinity often depend on a
public perception of domestic control and competence. A Bagisu wife may
kneel when serving food to a husband when his friends are present, but not
in normal life when the performance of ideal forms is relaxed. How do we
treat displays of deference to men in public speech events? They are usually
taken at face value as showing the subordination of women, but they may
also be strategic performances, or need claims. In Iran, Japan and Java, peo-
ple do not always struggle to dominate conversation, since the lower status
position can invoke protection and obligation of the powerful, and defer-
ence is experienced not as subservience but an assertion of claims (Tannen,
1994). The pose of the powerless can be effective. Need claims are made in
particular ways for particular audiences, and invoke legitimating norms like
the obligations of men to provide for women, and they require performance
of dependence and vulnerability (Fraser, 1989). Thus effacement may be
a strategic move in claim making. How sincere are these performances?
Goffman (1956: 58) comments that ‘by easily showing a regard that he does
not have, the actor can feel that he is preserving a kind of inner autonomy,
holding off the ceremonial order by the very act of upholding it . . . and he
10 Cecile Jackson

is free to insinuate all kinds of disregard by carefully modifying intonation,

pronunciation . . . and so on’.
Public deference in one realm can also be manifest alongside contra-
dictory, and sincere, private expressions of gender relations. Contexts and
registers matter. Rajasthani women are required, in public, to show extreme
modesty and shame, and men, detachment and authority. If a woman speaks
to her husband at all it must be performed with maximum self-effacement —
‘turning her head away, whispering, speaking obliquely in the third person,
or pointedly addressing someone else in the room with a message intended
for him’ (Gold and Raheja, 1994: 106). Yet both male and female folklore
traditions portray women as bold, forthright and direct, making material
demands, personal criticisms, threats and invitations to intimacy. Since Ra-
jasthani marital relationships involve intense personal love, and romantic
ideals for both women and men, the public roles are a performance of only
one dimension of gender relations, and neither register is a complete account,
or a reliable metric of women’s power.

Authoritative Public Speech and Participation

The relative absence of women from public politics is a remarkable constant

across the great diversity of human cultures. Formal public speech reflects
and creates authority and power, and the absence of women’s voices feels
like a critical absence which self-evidently reproduces gender inequalities.
Public speech has impact through both persuasion, where oratorical skill
matters, and impression, where speakers express their authority based on as-
cribed positions of power, without interest in persuading listeners and where
oratorical skill is unimportant (Arno, 1985). Both forms lack women; they
are generally excluded from the political roles of impression-oriented speak-
ers, and from the skills and identities appropriate for oratory as persuasion-
oriented speakers.
Authoritative speakers are often men because they dominate at public
events, in public roles, and in socialization for oratory (Strathern, 1975). But
is this ‘about’ the domination of women? Authority in Meratus speech, for
example, is outsider speech. Men know more outsider words than women,
and are more comfortable talking to strangers, and women are thus ‘more
likely than men to be described (or to describe themselves) as bungul,
“stupid” — that is, shy, inappropriate, or inarticulate. Women, however, are
not defined as bungul’ (Tsing, 1993: 197, emphasis in original). Further-
more, many men never become powerful orators. Oratory is not necessarily
authored by men to dominate women, who are anyway excluded from po-
litical prominence, e.g. through patriliny, but to express and reproduce male
hierarchies.
Thus, pace participation, admitting women to political authority and voice
through public oratory will require more than committee memberships and
Speech, Gender and Power 11

reserved places. Male oratory is performed with particular postures, voices,

facial expressions, words and metaphors, although the masculinities dis-
played are diverse. Merina ‘oratory is so polite that the choice of what can
be said and how it can be said has largely disappeared’ (Bloch, 1975: 8),
while Wolof low-ranking speech intermediaries are used by high-ranking
nobles to speak on their behalf. Griots specialize in public speech making on
behalf of nobles, providing the spirit and affect to persuade, while nobles are
silenced by ideals of restraint, torpidity and sangfroid (Irvine, 1990: 126–
61). By contrast, for Maori men, ‘oratory is the prime qualification for entry
into the power game’ and requires skill, knowledge, practice and creativity
(Salmond, 1975: 50) as well as entertainment; ‘One great speaker . . . used
to take his shoes off so that he could move to greater effect, and in moments
of peak excitement he would stamp his feet in a staccato dance, a red carna-
tion nodding from the lapel of his pin-striped suit and shark’s teeth earrings
flying’ (ibid.: 56). The effects of words and silences depend on identities
and performances, not simply on utterances, and participatory development
initiatives often have a naı̈ve view of what the inclusion of women in public
speech involves. They also overlook the places where women are untether-
ing and creatively refiguring public oratory through the embeddings of, for
example, shamans and prophets.
Within a context where leaders and public power are evidently male,
Tsing’s research with women shamans (Kalimantan, Indonesia) shows their
breathtaking parodic invention. One shaman, Uma Adang, laminated ‘fake-
Koran readings, pompous “government” speeches full of unintelligible pa-
triotic verbiage, and eerie pronouncements about the political intersections
of the past and future’ (Tsing, 1993: 11),4 carried and fed a large white plas-
tic baby doll, and had Tsing tape speeches so that she could play them back
to audiences with grandeur. Uma Adang created her leadership on the basis
of speech-prayers of her own making, using mimicry and secrecy, creating
new forms of speech, new local and global histories. She — like the other
exceptional women Tsing observes — creates and performs, moving beyond
the ordinary constraints of gender with a playful seriousness and creative
skill (ibid.: 252). Exclusion from formal public discussion does not preclude
women from making powerful cultural interventions through other means,
and in other contexts.

Powerful Public Speech

Participation in development processes is very focused on the particular

context of public politics. But public talk goes on in many other contexts,

4. For example, ‘The date the seventh/ the year 1800/ peace be with you/ including/ to the
honourable/ speaking in the History of the World/ which contains the adat/ of the prophet
Lahat/ beginning/ to be/ broadened/ by History/ that is the most famous/ or the highest/each
day/ or each/ of to actualise/ peace and perfection’ (Tsing, 1993: 11).
12 Cecile Jackson

like markets and courts. Ethnographies of the gendered character of these

kinds of public talk suggest that they can be domains where gender identi-
ties are expanded and reformed by women. The emergence in recent years
of numerous women in Morroccan marketplaces — as orators, vendors,
herbalists, and so on — is accomplished by remaking speech genres like
bargaining, using religious aphorisms and other means to justify their trans-
gressive presence, and subtly subvert patriarchy ‘by infiltrating its expressive
forms with themes and meanings incongruous to it’ (Kapchen, 1996: 277).
Women in Kenyan Kadhi’s courts (Hirsch, 1998) reform the character of
disputations through their deployment of particular ethical discourses, and
claims of emotional abuse, and also feminize public spaces and discourses
through strategic and inventive language use. These are examples of what
Goffman describes as ‘embedding’, i.e. where production formats are cre-
atively transposed and laminated to legitimate new places and forms of
women’s voices.
The disaggregation of roles of principal, author and animator in public
speech events also reveals powerful speech roles that are not otherwise
apparent, e.g. as authors and principals. In researching ceremonial speech
in Madagascar, Keenan (1974: 110) left a tape recorder running, after a
ceremonial speech event for marriage negotiations went disastrously wrong
(excessive verbal jousting wrecked the negotiations), and captured women
moving in after the event, declaring that the elders had made a shambles
of the thing, and getting the alliance back on track with deputations to the
offended party. Access to authoritative speech may be achieved through
men as animators. For example, in a study of irrigation water user groups
in Nepal, Swarteveen (2006: 202) shows that women had a preference for
behind-the-scenes discussions rather than formal participation. In this way
they could influence decisions without incurring the obligations to irrigation
system maintenance labour that full membership would involve, and ‘steal’
water without retribution.
Public speech is not always formal, or framed by male political interests,
and women can choose to provoke public speech encounters on their own
terms. Public verbal duelling by Nigerian Hausa women, through exchanges
of proverbs, which often question male sexuality, embarrasses husbands into
capitulation on issues of disagreement. Women are in control of these footing
shifts, and men disadvantaged, silenced even, by ideals of masculinity which
emphasize the importance of men sexually satisfying their wives, and the
need for restraint and dignity in male conduct (Salamone, 1976: 363). Here
women make use of a marginal location, and moral inferiority, for efficacious
speech. Similarly the belligerent and abusive eruptions of a kros by women in
a PNG community (Kulick, 1993) are occasions for gendered assertions and
claims, for the artful use of language, and for manipulation of stereotypes. In
a kros, a woman ‘bellows at [the audience] in screams that rock the village, “I
am a real woman”. “All the time my hands, my liver get burned sitting next
Speech, Gender and Power 13

to a fire cooking for you, my fuck-around husband whose black prickhead

bones can’t even build me a decent house to live in”’ (ibid.: 527).
Powerful public speech is not necessarily in authoritative forms. Alongside
formal public speech, informal talk — joking, debating and gossiping —
has a much greater involvement of women. Both informal public speech and
formal public talk exercise power. In Lau (Fiji) ‘Public speeches emphasise
common values and enhance the positive feelings of group solidarity, while
private talk supplies the teeth that make violations of norms painful’ (Arno,
1985: 132).

The Power of Listeners and Loose Talk

As well as public speaking, public listening is part of particular participation

frameworks. Hearers have power, for speech effects depend on them. Lis-
teners participate actively in co-constructing the talk through gesture, align-
ments and so on; they enable and shape speech (Godwin, 2007). Women
who are not on the podium can speak effectively as an audience, and from the
margins. Some of the power of the subaltern lies in being freed from social
expectations and able to disrupt with a degree of impunity, and the greater
the distance between superior and inferior, the greater the need of the for-
mer for deference from the latter. Hegemonic masculinities which prescribe
dignity and dominance for men simultaneously make men vulnerable to the
refusals of women to show respect and acknowledge male authority. In pub-
lic meetings women may snipe, mock and undermine male authority, sitting
on the edges of public meetings throwing in sarcastic remarks, and engaging
in back-talk against community authority (Tsing, 1993: 112). Formal Maori
oratory is completely male (‘“only the cock was made to crow”, say the men,
“if the hen tries, wring her neck!”’) and an elder was observed switching
off a sound system when a woman stood to speak (Salmond, 1975: 50–51).
However, Maori women in audiences comment loudly, and ‘if a young or
incompetent speaker pushes himself too far forward or breaks an important
rule, the old women of the tribe stand before him, turn around and flip up
their skirts by way of graphic comment’ (ibid.: 47). A place on the podium
for women may potentially confer authority, but sacrifices sideline sniping
and back-talk.
The significance of exclusion from formal public speech may be rather
over-estimated if meetings are not the main site of decision making, since
‘usually decisions are made and consensus reached before and after the
meeting in informal discussions that employ a more direct style and in
which women participate more actively’ (Gal, 1991: 188), if public talk is
sought in restricted places, and if the power of informal public talkers, and
of listeners, is under-estimated.
One form of talk which is feminized, denigrated and disruptive, is gossip
and indiscretion. Nagovisi (Papua) husbands and wives are differentiated by
14 Cecile Jackson

strength and talk; men provide physical strength as an energy source whilst
‘women’s power to make things happen is through talk’ (Nash, 1987: 158),
influencing public opinion with sharp tongues, insults and disputes. They
do not engage in oratory, but this is not at the heart of decision making and
public affairs. Instead it is the talk of women:

around nearly every event of importance [where] a ‘veil of versions’ is built up through
(non-oratorial) talk by women and their indiscretion . . . [which] can be seen as a matter of
women’s use of their talk to register events. Men guard their talk and believe themselves to be
discreet; women bring things out into the open and earn complaints from men when talk is not
managed to masculine advantage. So women’s talk is a kind of freedom of expression they
feel entitled to exercise and a way of protecting their interests by broadcasting information.
(ibid.: 160)

Men complain about female indiscretion, for example, if a man invites a

woman to have sex there is always a risk she will answer in a loud voice
so others can hear ‘What? So-and-so wants to have sex relations with me?’
(ibid.: 160).
Negative meanings adhere to gossip (Gluckman, 1963), from male fears
of what groups of women might be saying to one another, and the possible
challenge to male authority (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 2003: 99–100).
Gossip is both feminized and devalued as talk which is unsubstantiated, triv-
ial, scurrilous, personal and malicious. Yet it is also potentially powerful, for
it is evaluative talk (Wert and Salovey, 2004: 123). Gossip judges behaviour
against norms and values which may (in an all-women context) be rather
different to those of mainstream society, it decodes the self-presentational
efforts of others and their backstage selves (Goffman, 1974), it levels the
advantaged downwards and transmits norms. The power of gossip exposes
the vulnerability of male authority.

Speaking Otherwise: Resistance and Body Talk

Subjectivities are always embodied, and bodies can speak in ways that words
cannot (Jackson, 1989). There are limits to what words can accomplish, and
‘the ambiguity of meaning associated with embodied experience is some-
thing which can only be incompletely copied in language’ (Moore, 1999).
If speech cannot bear the full weight of the expression of subjectivities it
refigures the way we think about women’s words as the fundamental ex-
pression of those subjectivities. It also revives interest in the prominence of
embodied gesture in women’s political expression; the parodies of power
during collective protests, dirty clothes, play rifles, marching and shouting.
The hegemonic male template of ‘speech’ draws gender and development
analysts into debating false consciousness, rather than the distinctive embod-
ied ‘speech’ of women. Women’s bodies talk, and in more complex ways
than the notion of false consciousness allows, sometimes expressing overt
Speech, Gender and Power 15

resistance, and sometimes the implicit and emergent resistance of ‘double

consciousness’.
Explicit protest through body idioms is common; Kenyan Kikuyu women
can ‘speak’ displeasure and anger with buttock scratching to insult officials,
the display of genitals as a curse, and mooning in unison to refuse authority
(Wipper, 1989: 305). In Bamenda, Cameroon, anlu offers means for women
to collectively punish men for crimes against women such as incest, vi-
olence to pregnant women, abuse of elderly women and sexual insults to
women. Bakweri women of Cameroon also collectively protest male insults
to women’s genitals (usually that they smell) with obscene gestures and
songs, and court records show many cases involving female complaint over
male insults about smelling bottoms, and ‘private parts being watery and
hollow’ (Ardener, 1975: 33). The Balong and the Kom also have related
practices — chanting, dancing, obscenity and flashing. A report of Kikuyu
and Pokot protest in East Africa describes the punishment of a husband (for
insulting his wife) with abusive songs and dances, with women urinating on
the man and putting naked vulvas in his face (Edgerton and Conant, 1964).
These embodied vocabularies of protest address both personal and broader
politics. In the 1929 women’s war in eastern Nigeria, thousands of women
rioted over rumoured taxation of women, and ‘[T]he women were led by an
old and nude woman of great bulk. They acted in a strange manner, some
lying on the ground and kicking their legs in the air, and others making
obscene gestures’ (Ifeka-Moller, 1975: 129). The 1958 women’s protests
against land policies in Cameroon saw naked or male-clad women covered
in dirt, declaring:

Women suffer for work but ah ha, they tried to cover us for down [deprecate us]. They say
we follow men for back [are secondary to men and so must follow behind them]. Ah ha, that
is the thing we are seeing. Isn’t it they who are killing us? Don’t we give birth to children?
Aren’t they killing our children? What are our children going to eat? People, they are dying
too much. (Diduk, 1989: 343)

Whilst this resistance is overt and explicitly gendered, women can also speak
through more ambiguous embodied performances such as spirit possession
cults. Boddy (1989: 131) describes, for Sudan, women:
Smoking, wanton dancing, flailing about, burping and hiccupping, drinking blood and alco-
hol, wearing male clothing, publicly threatening men with swords, speaking loudly, lacking
due regard for etiquette, [which] . . . are hardly the behaviours of Hofriyati women for whom
dignity and propriety are leading concerns. But in the context of the zar they are common
and expected.

Zar5 enactments are filled with inversions, women become men, the pow-
erless become powerful, ageing is reversed, categories are undermined, and

5. Zar is a spirit possession cult widespread in northern Sudan, similar to many across Africa
where they are associated with healing and predominantly involve women. Lewis (1966)
16 Cecile Jackson

‘participants are made to feel just slightly uneasy. One who attends is left
with a vague sensation that something important has happened, that she has
seen more than she has observed’ (ibid.: 307).
Boddy argues that zar is an anti-society and its language an anti-language.
An anti-society is a counter-hegemonic form within society at large through
which a subaltern group formulates an alternative view of the world, con-
strained by the system of meanings it shares with that society but concerned
to express those meanings from its own unprivileged standpoint (ibid.: 156–
8). And ‘Like other anti-languages, zar is a form of social discourse which
is also metacultural, and it is this which allows those possessed to view
their world from, as it were, “without”’ (ibid.: 158–9). Being outside of
the hegemonic speech world, or occupying double locations with multiple
discourses, creates an implicit awareness of oppression.
In its supportive and subversive modes, the zar represents women’s double consciousness:
their commitment to mainstream values and their awareness, however implicit, of their
oppression. Possession’s power is analogous to that of a satirical allegory in the West, where
two lines of thought are joined within a single text and it is entirely up to the reader first to
distinguish, then to decide, or not to decide, between them. (ibid.: 306)

This double consciousness is also expressed in women’s parodies of public

power such as the 1940s account of a women’s society in eastern Nigeria
whose officials included:
the chairwoman or mama; gun-bearers clad in thick, dark blue trousers and pillbox hats, pink
and green, carrying miniature guns over their shoulders; policewomen similarly attired; a
‘D.C.’ and a Mwa Beke, white woman, who ‘stands out in one’s mind’, sometimes for the
ferocity of her expression, sometimes for her clothes — a pink silk dress with an orange
Tam O’Shanter on one occasion and horn rimmed spectacles with a white blob on each lens.
(Green, 1964: 225–6)

The ambiguity and indirection of these performances, the implication of

subversion alongside explicit denials invokes Goffman’s ideas on team per-
formances, the manipulation of double meanings, the creation of subtexts
of resistance through gesture and performance. The indirect and ambiguous
have advantages for the subaltern, for they allow her to speak, in deniable
ways, if need be, to those with ears to hear.
The absence of women’s voices from formal ‘political’ institutions has
seemed an intractable problem for gender equity, and a metric of subordi-
nation, whilst involving women in participatory ways in meetings, councils,
committees, user-groups and the like is an important focus for political de-
velopment. This concern is, however, based on a privileging of certain kinds
of talk and certain kinds of contexts. We possibly over-emphasize the power
of formal public male speech, imagine a motivation of gender subordination,

understood this as subaltern expression by those otherwise silenced, but to those involved
zar is explained in terms of women’s greater vulnerability to possession.
Speech, Gender and Power 17

and tend to ignore public contexts like markets, churches and courts, and
informal public talk where women have effective voice. Their inclusion in
official public speech events, which is easily subverted by resistant men,
may occlude the strategic possibilities of women managing ‘dependent’
identities, and of the broader radical unsettling of gender orders through
interventions as listeners, their creation of new production formats, and of
the untethering of speech from original meanings and resignifications. We
also remain deaf to feminized speech registers of poetry and stories, and to
resistance expressed through embodied communication.
The concept of embodiment helps de-mystify the assumption that
speech = power; it also defuses the anxiety about the content of women’s
speech as a metric of recognition of subordination, and it raises questions
about exclusively speech-based empowerment efforts.

RECONSIDERING SILENCE

Mutedness and Foreclosures

The persistent idea of silenced women, particularly in Ardener’s (1975)

influential formulation of mutedness, arises from his observation that women
in anthropological monographs were present but silent. ‘The truth is that
women rarely speak in social anthropology in any but . . . the sense of merely
uttering or giving tongue’ (ibid.: 2). He argues, from Bakweri ethnography
(Cameroon), that women are constrained in direct testimony because the
vocabulary of their society has been formed by male meanings and concepts.
Thus they cannot ‘speak’, and confronted with questions, ‘women giggle
when young, snort when old, reject the question, laugh at the topic’ (ibid.:
2). Butler too comments that subjects are formed around the speakable,
and there is ‘the sense of a subject at risk when the possibility of speech is
foreclosed’ (Butler, 1997: 139). She argues that the subject is never, however,
fully reduced by these foreclosures, and that everyone ‘speaks a language
that is never fully one’s own’ (ibid.: 140). Speech foreclosures also work on
men as subjects; ideals of masculine character and behaviour exclude men
from expressing elements of their experience, such as emotions, yet this is
not conceptualized as mutedness.
Reading Phyllis Kaberry,6 broadly contemporaneous with Ardener, raises
doubt, however, about Ardener’s account of mutedness. In the conversations
she records, initiated around the custom of having more mourning days for
the death of a woman than a man and planting more yams on the birth of a
girl than a boy, Nsaw women’s statements include the following: ‘Woman
is an important thing, a thing of God, a thing of the earth. All people come
from her’ (Kaberry, 1952: vii), and ‘A woman is a very God. Men are not

6. Kaberry researched multiple ethnic groups in Bamenda, Cameroon.

18 Cecile Jackson

at all. What are men?’. Kaberry comments that ‘sometimes the answer to
this rhetorical question was — “worthless!”’ (ibid.: vii). Another woman
says, ‘Important things are women. Men are little. The things of women are
important. What are the things of men? Men are indeed worthless. Women
are indeed God. Men are nothing. Have you not seen?’ (ibid.: 150). The male
retort in this conversation is, ‘Yes, a woman is like God, and like God she
cannot speak. She must sit silently. It is good that she should only accept’
(ibid.: 152).
Kaberry also reports, in her discussion of feminine self-respect and dignity,
that whilst taking pride in farming prowess, women also had:

little praise for the field-drudge, for the woman who, in her absorption in her farming has
not the time for a little gossip . . . [T]wo women discussing a somewhat unpopular member
of the compound, as they watched her bend untiringly over her hoe [said] ‘She only looks at
the earth; she does not gossip at all! She works, then passes on; she does not speak. Silent
always! Silence is a very bad thing!’. (ibid.: 71)

The explanation for Ardener’s observation of the reluctance of women

to speak to researchers, their snorts, giggles and dismissals of questions,
may not have as much to do with a generalized exclusion from talk and
masculinized language as he imagines. Kaberry’s informants seem to have
no difficulty expressing alternative world views, challenging male author-
ity, and celebrating that most feminized form of talk, gossip. One must
therefore wonder how effective or ineffective the constraints of a male-
oriented language, and the foreclosures on subjectivities, actually are.
Furthermore, the male comment on this assertiveness is so wishful, in the
light of the clear absence of silence (Godlike or otherwise) from women,
that the idea of muted women begins to look rather like a male fan-
tasy. Women may well have a different relation to language than men,
but the term ‘mutedness’, or the notion of silencing, as exclusion from
a relationship with language that confers power, seems rather question-
able to me. The presence of public debate about the social value of
women and men also suggests that the gender order is not a determin-
ing force which excludes women from speech, as Ardener represented
it, but also an explicit and performative field of contestation, with vic-
tories and defeats, tactics and intentions, as well as doxic unquestioned
ideas.
Doubts about mutedness are also raised from other regions (Gal, 1991), and
Keesing, on the basis of his collection of autobiographies of Kwaio women,
argues that specific historical circumstances, micropolitics of gender, and
the co-created character of the ethnographic encounter pattern the articulacy
of women speakers. For Kwaio women (isolated relative to men, inarticulate
in the 1960s but assertive ideologues of ‘culture’ twenty years later), there
was a time lag in coming to see their culture as something to speak, i.e.
externalized, idealized, coherent and codified; thus ‘mutedness must always
Speech, Gender and Power 19

be historically and contextually situated, and bracketed with doubt’ (Keesing,

1985: 27).

Secrecy and Resistance

If undisciplined talk can confer power, as we have seen above, so too can
secrecy be a form of gendered resistance. Powerful persons often speak
less — interviewers, confessors, gods. What matters is whether, and how,
silence is imposed or elected, and subaltern silences cannot be assumed to
be imposed. In writing about peasant resistance, and the question of explicit
intention, Scott comments that:

For many forms of peasant resistance, we have every reason to expect that the actors will
remain mute about their intentions. Their safety may depend on silence and anonymity; the
kind of resistance itself may depend for its effectiveness on the appearance of conformity;
their intentions may be so embedded in the peasant subculture and in the routine, taken-for-
granted struggle to provide for the subsistence and survival of the household so to remain
inarticulate. The fish do not talk about the water’. (Scott, 1985: 29)

Secrecy as resistance is not always subterranean, or unarticulated, as in

Abu-Lughod’s study of Bedouin gender relations where ‘Bedouin women
collude to erect a barrier of silence about their world. Information flows uni-
directionally from the men’s arena into the women’s and not vice versa. Since
women become deferential in the presence of most adult men, men generally
do not overhear the natural conversations of women’ (Abu-Lughod, 1985:
644–5). Here a transgression of this code by a young woman produced anger:
‘We [the women in the core community] have lived together for seventeen
years and never has any woman brought women’s talk to the men! In our
community we have one way. Women don’t tell the men what goes on be-
tween women. Even the old women — why, they talk to the men, but they
don’t expose the secrets’ (ibid.: 645).

Performing Words: Silence, Ambiguity and Resistance

In oral cultures and communications, words rarely stand as textual testimony,

separated from the inflections of performance. The concept of mutedness
implies a distinction between, on the one hand, testimony as direct speech
which represents unmediated reflection of interests and thoughts, and on the
other hand, indirect forms of expression, such as myths and poetry, which
are of particular significance to muted groups excluded from testimony.
But speech of all forms is always a performance and, along with silence,
part of impression management (Goffman, 1974). In the presentation of
selves to others the performance (carrying varying degrees of self belief and
self-awareness) is socialized to fit into the understanding of the society in
20 Cecile Jackson

which it is presented. And it is idealized so that ‘when the individual presents

himself before others his performance will tend to incorporate and exemplify
the officially accredited values of the society, more so, in fact, than does his
behaviour as a whole’ (ibid.: 45). Thus American women at universities
report ‘allowing their boyfriends to explain things to them tediously that
they already know; they conceal proficiency in mathematics from their less
able consorts; they lose ping-pong games just before the ending’ (ibid.: 48).
Impression management depends critically on dramaturgical discipline,
especially the management of one’s face and voice. Performances can also
be managed: for the secret amusement of ‘team mates’, she may throw herself
into a part with exaggerations which are enough to amuse those aware of
the parody but which leave the rest of the audience unsure of whether
fun is being made of them (ibid.: 185). Resistance and meaning inhere in
the performance of talk as much as the words, and in the performance of
silences. Dumb insolence may be a very explicitly resistant silence, while
other styles are more covert, or genuinely compliant. Performing talk and
silence allows ambiguity of meaning to be introduced — rolled eyes, winks,
mock accents — which confound the actual words as they might appear in
a written transcript. Goffman might have asked of Ardener, ‘just what does
the giggle, the snort, the laugh, and the evasion mean to the Bakweri, and in
this particular context and conversation?’.

Silence and Agency

Speaking can lead to a loss of agency, since testimony which produces

texts allows words to be used by others for many purposes, as noted above.
Testimonies spin out of control of the speaker, in globalized circuits, and
‘voice without control may be worse than silence’ (Gready, 2001: 147).
The manner in which silence and speech connect to ways of being a person
is fundamental to the significance we attach to talk. Western dispositions
valorize speech as an expression of agency, and agency of personhood. These
linkages have been questioned. Silence, or not communicating, can be a
positive reaction to a sense of being controlled. Mahoney (1996: 615) argues
that flawed communication produces agency. The anger of communication
failures motivates a sense of agency and resistance, and power is then located
in the delicate balance between being heard and not heard, speaking and not
speaking. The struggle to communicate, ‘far from obscuring one’s own sense
of agency . . . actually may set the conditions that give rise to it’.
Furthermore, Reader (2007: 581) questions the equation of agency with
personhood, and of thinking of persons only as agents. Persons are much
more than this, having ‘patiency’ as well as agency; ‘a being is a “patient”
when it is acted on’. Where agency is based on action, capability, choice
and independence, patiency refers to the reception of action, to incapacities
and vulnerabilities, to constraint and necessity and to dependency (see also
Speech, Gender and Power 21

Kittay, 1999), all of which are as surely constitutive of persons as agency.

Reader argues these are not privations but other ways of being persons,
and an inalienable consequence of being a person. ‘Full persons . . . are pas-
sive, needy, constrained and dependent as well as active, capable, free and
independent’ (Reader, 2007: 603–4).
The silence of women in adversity becomes re-figured in this view. The
consequences of celebration of agency, and condemnation of victimhood,
‘amounts to an endorsement of the moral values that underpin the agential
conception, abandons suffering women and compounds the harm to them’
(Reader, 2007: 596). In western culture we think that the two responses to
violence are fight or flight, but women facing violence often do neither. They
endure. Endurance is ‘a way to be a person in adversity . . . [it] is difficult and
courageous’ (Butler, 1997: 597). Veena Das’s work on partition experiences
of women (1988, 2007) reports their term ‘digesting the poison’ for their
endurance of the violence meted out to them. ‘Their endurance absorbs
the violence, as a harbour wall absorbs the forces of the sea. . .[E]ndurance
demands silence, so that ordinary life can continue, or begin again, amid the
rubble that violence has created’ (Reader, 2007: 598).

CONCLUSIONS

Two sets of conclusions can be drawn from this. Briefly, in relation to

research epistemologies, the implications are that talk always needs trian-
gulation with observation and other evidence, and disembodied and decon-
textualized quotes from respondents are questionable evidence. A wider
range of speech contexts and registers deserve attention in development re-
search, as does recognition of how performance inflects all talk, whether it
is a public display of dependence or compliance, of dumb insolence, or of
parody and mimicry. Thinking about participation frameworks and formats
suggests further questions: can the ‘life history’ form be assumed relevant
and viable everywhere?; what is happening in the participation format of the
focus group?; does the way reported speech is quoted ventriloquize research
subjects? Finally, the concept of embodiment erodes the idea that women’s
words are the only way to understand their subjectivities (Moore, 1999).
In relation to the focus on speech and power it seems that gender differ-
ences in talk are significant but highly variable and context-dependent, and
particular techniques of talk cannot be pinned to the exercise of power. In de-
velopment discourses, the trope of the silent Third World woman (Mohanty,
1991) has its uses for gender advocates, and produces contradictory sub-
jectifications, while the meaning of their speech and silences has remained
fixed on the question of false consciousness. But if, following Butler, speech
has a loosely geared relationship to personhood and to action, and can be
untethered and resignified; and if, following Goffman, not only speaking but
hearing too offers multiple, influential, participation roles, then reading the
22 Cecile Jackson

gendered politics of talk can be placed in a more open, and less anxious,
frame than the dualistic equation of speech with power and silence with
weakness.
A model of women as experiencing a speech deficit misleads in a number
of ways; it misses the ways hegemonic masculinities limit the range of ex-
pression for men, it measures women’s ‘voice’ against a male template. This
model is blind to the uses of the body, and the performance of talk, and deaf
to the many ways that women ‘speak’ effectively because it is not attuned
to different registers, or the multiple contexts where women speak. More
useful is an approach based on Goffman’s distinction between principals,
authors and animators, openness to a wide range of communication forms,
and close attention to performance in all registers. Rather than assuming that
silence equals subordination, and that power adheres to gender categories,
we should look for the resistant uses of both speech and silence, and ways of
talking through the body. In particular, in thinking about resistance, Boddy’s
‘double consciousness’ is a good way to think of the subtle ways in which
gender is observed and the unsettling ways it is culturally commented upon,
with emergent consciousness and reflexivity.
Resistance and empowerment is perhaps better approached with disag-
gregation of the myriad forms, formats, contexts, speech roles, participation
formats and registers in which women speak. Effective speech for women
often rests on undisciplined, uncontrollable talk, which could be forfeited by
inclusion into authoritative, formal kinds of male public podium talk. It also
often turns on ambiguity and indirection in speech performances, to manage
the ‘double consciousness’ of resistance/compliance. There is an opportu-
nity cost of the domestication of women’s speech. The reconsideration of
silences also unsettles the idea that agency requires certain kinds of speech,
since silences can be resistant and expressive, speech can be associated with
a loss of agency, and subjectivities are more than agency. Patiency too mat-
ters; and perhaps agency should not be the exclusive objective and metric of
empowerment.

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Abu-Lughod, L. (1986) Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press.
Agarwal, B. (1994) A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia. Cambridge:
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Ardener, S. (1975) ‘Sexual Insult and Female Militancy’, in S. Ardener (ed.) Perceiving Women,
pp. 29–53. London: John Wiley and Sons.
Arno, A. (1985) ‘Impressive Speeches and Persuasive Talk: Traditional Patterns of Political
Communication in Fiji’s Lau Group from the Perspective of Pacific Ideal Types’, Oceania
56(2): 124–37.
Bloch, M. (1975) ‘Introduction’, in M. Bloch (ed.) Political Language and Oratory in Traditional
Society, pp. 1–28. London: Academic Press.
Speech, Gender and Power 23

Boddy, J. (1988) Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan.
Madison, WI: Wisconsin University Press.
Butler, J. (1997) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. London: Routledge.
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Cecile Jackson is professor of international development at the School of

International Development, University of East Anglia, Norwich, Norfolk,
N4 7TJ, UK (e-mail: Cecile.Jackson@uea.ac.uk). She has researched gen-
der and intra-household relations in Nigeria, Zimbabwe and India, in rela-
tion to poverty and well-being, environmental change and water resources.
Her recent work concerns epistemological issues, and the changing nature
of marriage; see the special issue ‘Marriage, Gender Relations and Social
Change’, Journal of Development Studies (2012).