A link to working drafts for papers not listed below will be sent to registered attendees. You can also request it by emailing yun.emily.wang@duke.edu
Christine Sun Kim's Ethos of Quiet Refsal
Jessica A. Holmes
This chapter traces an ethos of quiet refusal in the creative output of Christine Sun Kim. Kim’s quiet refusal indexes a disavowal of oralism and audism through a refusal to “voice” and to comply with sound etiquette, and a simultaneous opting out of the intergenerational shame ingrained in the sonic logics of racial assimilation (Kheshti 2017; Hong 2020; Duncan 2004). This ethos of quiet refusal finds its voice through an idiosyncratic integration of visual-spatial cues from ASL, notational symbols from glossing, close-captioning, and Western music notation, a language that speaks to what Friedner has characterized more generally as the “multimodal unruliness” of deafness and what Kusters et al describe as its diverse “semiotic repertoires” (Friedner 2022; Kusters 2017; Kusters et al 2021). To that end, I approach Kim’s quiet refusal as a multisensory, multimodal animating principle that is unbounded by straightforward divisions between sound and silence and audible versus inaudible, echoing the central framing of this volume. The capaciousness of quietude in Kim’s work serves as a vital corrective to the naturalized associations between deafness and silence in the Western cultural imaginary, wherein silence implies a dialectical limit, whether with respect to auditory thresholds, consciousness, or the normative terms and conditions of human subjectivity (Ochoa Gautier 2015). To read her scores as a hearing person is to encounter an idiosyncratic musical language that refuses the ingrained structures and syntax of majoritarian systems of signification, one that others sound and its attendant norms, making the power sewn into voice, “silence,” and music newly visible in the process (to draw on verbiage from Cathy Park Hong’s essay “Bad English”).
Your Silence Speaks Volumes: Testimonial Injustice and the Perils of Narration
Sidra Lawrence
Proceeding from the intellectual frameworks provided by trauma studies, in this chapter I will discuss the limitations of testimony as a liberatory practice. In western judicial systems, and increasingly through the public circulation of first person accounts of survival (#metoo), great value is placed on testimony both in terms of determining truthfulness and also as an important precursor to the enactment of justice. Within these practices, the idea that proclaiming “one’s truth” through narrative utterance is, in and of itself liberating, just as silence is cast as disempowering, shameful, or fearful. In this chapter I discuss the ways in which the dominant western oppositional hierarchy of silence and speech shape survivors’ capacity to convey meaningful expression through non-narrative modalities. Based on research that points to the effects of trauma on recall and memory processing as fragmented, disjunctive, and incomplete, I explore how survivors of sexual assault are at a deficit and placed in danger of re-traumatization and harm within the current judicial and extra-judicial procedures (Ehlers & Clark 2000; Chatterjee 2018; Westera, Zydervelt, Kaladelfos, & Zajac 2017). Connecting this research to the framework of testimonial injustice (Fricker 2007) provides an opportunity to ask several questions, including: 1) what are the ways that the western judicial system (and public fora related to justice) are over-relying on linear narrative construction and utterance? 2) Who is left out? 3) What are the deficits of collective social understanding and interpretive resources based on current relationships to audibility and intelligibility? And 4) how does the social expectation for respectable, proper, or credible speech undermine justice? By examining these questions we can both take stock of the limits of verbal language in the narrative of remembered violence, and explore the possibilities of performative and gestural expression as a means to justice.