| Kommentar |
Voice and embodiment: critical perspectives
It is a common-place to think about social protests as raising one’s voice, and that oppression operates through silencing. Yet, what exactly do we mean when we use these terms? In recent debates on epistemic injustice, we can find an account of silencing as denying oppressed groups the possibility to interpret and testify of the unjust harms inflicted on them (Medina, 2013; Fricker, 2009). To claim the right to interpret and testify of these injustices is a form of epistemic resistance in which one listens to the voice of the marginalized (Collins, 2019). However, these accounts seem to prioritize the words that are spoken to the sound of the voice. This raises the question if and how we can re-think the voice as embodied and related to socially situated subjects?
In this seminar, we explore the themes of voice and silence by focusing on the embodied dimension to focus on the role of the body in social protests. In doing so, we seek to answer the following question: what does it mean to argue, as Adriana Cavarero (2005) does, that western philosophy has wrongfully privileged logos over phone, and what are the implications of this bias for political philosophy? How is the body at stake in the process of ‘coming to voice’ (hooks) and what forms of self-transformation does it require (Foucault)? What are the implications of using the voice in alternative ways, such as singing or yelling, for our notion of political action (Spivak, Butler)? Finally, what are the limitations of thinking of the voice in such a concrete way, both politically and theoretically? |
| Literatur |
- Adriana Cavarero, For More than One Voice. Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (2005)
- Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza (1987)
- José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance, Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and the Social Imagination (2013)
- Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-state? Language, Politics, Belonging (2010)
- bell hooks, Talking Back. Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (2015)
- Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth. Lectures at the Collège de France 1983-1984 (2011)
|
