I've been very intrigued by Eva's Man, mostly because I found it unbearable to read at first. I couldn't even speak in our conversation in class. I was silenced by the silences within myself, like Eva's (to quote our classmate). I found it peculiar to hear the analytical conversation in class about Eva's silence so closely reflected my own experience with silence and voice and agency, although my story varies so much from her's. Since my inability to engage in the text and in class, I have found a new determination to enter Eva's Man. Perhaps to test the edges of my learning; to look at where I struggle with reading and thinking and speaking as a survivor reading about a survivor. But also because I wonder about how teaching the book itself may elicit voice or impose silence.

Adrienne Rich’s “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence” posits an ideal of honesty in the global community of women. She asserts that a woman lying, under any circumstance, is a direct product of our inability to break free of the patriarchal shackles that hold all women, and that truth, pure unadulterated uncensored truth, is the necessary tool that women must wield for freedom. By truth telling we (read women) create a web of relationship politics that actively resists the default of relationships built upon lies, relationships that perpetuate the patriarchal norms under which we have always existed. Truth telling and honesty not only allow women to build meaningful relationships that resist normative structures but complexify and deepen relationships to be truly meaningful connections.

As we've discussed the Eva's silences in class, and whether those silences have been empowering, I've been wondering about the exact role of silence.

Specifically, I've found myself aksing whether as a woman in American society, you can be [viewed as?] powerful without have control over your own image.

In taking the idea of engendering silence with more of a political science flair, I was thinking about connecting Stanley's ideas about language being used to silence in a political setting to our discussions in Joel's class about The New Jim Crow.

In particular I'm interested in the section about silencing by denying access to vocabulary: "it is difficult to have a reasoned debate about the costs and benefits of a policy when one side has seized control of the linguistic means to express [...] claims". It seems like this manifests itself in two ways: silencing voices by controlling the language around a debate, and silencing voices by assigning language to a person/movement/group in order to discredit them. 

I had a lot of critiques of Adrienne Rich right after I read “On Lies, Secrets and Silence”. I felt that for many women, especially those who hold more marginalized identities than just that of woman, silences are a form of survival. They may not always constitute autonomy but they keep you alive. Part of my view comes from my upbringing, which places women in the context of a more collectivist culture, rather than individualistic, which can still be a powerful form of feminism in its own right. I was thinking about this post where I discuss my mother’s feminism.

I want to delve into Eva's Man, using the lens of Kimberle Crenshaw's "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color" (http://www.jstor.org/stable/1229039) and perhaps some other texts from the Feminist Theory curriculum (maybe Lugones?). I want to examine the political implications of the novel and the intersections between gender, race, and other identities. How does silence play into identity politics? What are the connections between race, gender and silence? Between violence (physical, emotional, systemic) and silence? It was interesting to discuss in class today why Eva was silent.

Wendy Brown offers a counternarrative to the popular way of talking about silence in terms of silencing, arguing that silence can protect one in ways that voice is incapable of. I want to look at my last post to serendip through her words, looking at my words, but also at my silences to see in what ways my experience align with what Wendy Brown is arguing. I also want to push back against the notion that silence has to be either or. After looking back at my experiences with silence surrounding my last post, I found I could not place my silence in either category; what began as a protective mechanism, evolved into something that was crippling.