Rethinking Silence, Voice and Agency in Contested Gendered Terrains

Global and local contestations are not only gendered, they also raise important questions about agency and its practice and location in the twenty-first century. Silence and voice are being increasingly debated as sites of agency within feminist research on conflict and insecurity. Drawing on a wide range of feminist approaches, this volume examines the various ways that silence and voice have been contested in feminist research, and their impact on how agency is understood and performed, particularly in situations of conflict and insecurity.
The collection makes an important and timely contribution to interdisciplinary feminist theorizing of silence, voice and agency in global politics. Interrogating the intellectual landscape of existing debates about agency, silence and voice in an increasingly unequal and conflict-ridden world, the contributors to this volume challenge the dominant narratives of agency based on voice or speech alone as a necessary precondition for understanding or negotiating agency or empowerment. Many of the authors have engaged in field research in both the Global South and North and bring in-depth and diverse gendered case studies to their analysis, focusing on the increasing importance of examining silence as well as voice for understanding gender and agency in an increasingly embattled and complicated world.
This book will contribute to and deepen existing discussions of agency, silence and voice in development, culture and gender studies, political economy, postcolonial and de-colonial scholarship as well as in the field of International Relations.

Jane L. Parpart, Swati Parashar

Preface [Kimberly Hutchings] 1. Rethinking the Power of Silence in Insecure and Gendered Sites [Jane L. Parpart and Swati Parashar] 2. Voice, Silence, Agency, Confusion [Christine Sylvester] 3. Reconstructing the Silence-Speech Dichotomy in Feminist Security Studies: Gender, Agency and the Politics of Subjectivity in La Frontière Invisible [Lene Hansen] 4. Rethinking the Equation Between Voice and Power in Household Bargaining and Global Household Models [Suzanne Bergeron and Marianne Marchand] 5. Negative Space and the Feminist Act of Citation: Strategic Silence and the Limits of Gendering an Unloving Discipline [David Duriesmith] 6. Listening to Silences and Voices - A Methodological Framework [Ayelet Harel-Shalev and Shir Daphna-Tekoah] 7. Redemption and Empowerment among the Bail Boys in Trinidad [Catherine Ali] 8. Engaged Silences as Political Agency in Post-genocide Rwanda: Jeanne's Story [Susan Thomson] 9. Silence and Indigenous Women's Resistance: Jani Shikar Among the Adivasis of Jharkhand [Anju Oseema Maria Toppo and Swati Parashar] 10. Silence as Strategy in the Sexual Commerce Industry: A Case Study from India [Sudeshna Chatterjee and Jane L. Parpart]