2019 “‘Can You Hear Me Now?’: Race, Motherhood, and the Politics of Being Heard.” Politics & Gender, 15(4): 623-644.
What effect does feminist rhetoric have on other feminists? For far too long, scholars have been preoccupied with the limits of feminist claims-making, outlining the various ways and reasons for which women, especially women of color, are not listened to by those in positions of power. By defining successful speech and political practices in accordance with the dominant group’s standards, the types of speech acts and political practices understood as “successful” in getting feminists heard are severely limited, effacing practices that mobilize and activate other feminists and their allied communities.
My dissertation provides a necessary intervention to this problem by exploring the unique political strategies feminists use to get heard by other feminists and allies. Utterances and the doing of politics, I contend, must be seen as also existing outside of normatively recognized structures as something connective, communicative, and amplificatory. Imagining the practice of getting heard as also occurring outside of the dominant group gives weight and legitimacy to the claims made by feminists and opens up space for new forms of utterance. In our present political moment, with movements such as #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, and #NoBanNoWall striving to get heard, understanding how political claims communicate messages to those outside the dominant group is more important than ever, enabling us to better understand how social movements that challenge the status quo create and mobilize allies. By shifting our attention away from the dominant group as the sole audience, this group’s position as arbiter of legitimate democratic speech and practice can be challenged and the practices that threaten its power can be recuperated as productive political practices.
I apply a series of guiding questions to each case. First, I ask, what do we learn by thinking about how dismissed political practices reverberate outside of dominant discourses of recognition and legitimacy? In particular, what happens to our perception of the relative success of feminist claims-making if the dominant group is de-centered and we shift our focus to the effects of political claims on marginalized communities? Second, what does the dynamic between the dominant group and feminist claims uncover about the operation of power? Further, how does the feminist subject-position interact with systems of power to both challenge and reinforce existing discourses of oppression at the intersection of race, gender, and class?
I adopt an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates work across the social sciences and humanities to challenge understandings of feminist claims as largely unsuccessful in the face of dominant critique, attack, and refusal. I do this across five discursive spheres that correspond to the dissertation’s five chapters: (1) anger and reason, (2) motherhood and race, (3) grievance and victimhood, (4) epistemic (in)justice, and (5) hearing and praxis. Each of these five chapters offers a critical analysis of feminist speech practices grounded in our present political moment. In these chapters, I engage with perspectives on feminist political practice, specifically in how it challenges notions of affective legitimacy, engages with racist conceptions of motherhood and citizenship, challenges historical appropriation of trauma, confronts gendered and racist relations within feminism, and imagines new practices of hearing feminist voices. Taken together, these chapters provide a rigorous account of how feminist speech practices operate divergently across audiences, identities, and technologies. These chapters both highlight the existing challenges to getting heard as well as the political potential latent in feminist efforts deemed unsuccessful. The grounding theory provided in this project, however, is not limited to feminist speech and political practice. Its identification of the divergent ways in which feminist voices are silenced shares similarities with the ways in which other marginalized communities interact with dominant systems of power and urges us to question what can be learned by expanding our understanding of who is listening.