Content area
Full Text
This paper is an exploration of some forms of silent protest used by Kenyan women to bargain with patriarchy. The paper draws in part from an on-going study by the first author and also from existing materials, to elucidate the varied uses of silence as power by Kenyan women to counteract patriarchal dominance and oppression. While acknowledging that silence can be disempowering in the face of oppression, the paper holds that silence can also act as a space of fluid and profound empowering possibilities for women living in oppressive situations. An attempt is made to show how such women mutably employ silence to shift power in their interpersonal relationships. The paper, however, strongly underscores the growing need for research on the subject of silence as a tool of power in feminist discourses.
Introduction
Silence is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as the 'absence of sound' or to 'prohibit/prevent from speaking' but silence is more than the simple nonexistence of audible sound. According to Letherby (2003: 109), interpretation of silence is an important aspect of communication. In gender discourses, silence is much more commonly associated with women's disempowerment in reference mainly to their failure to speak out and/or act against gendered oppressive situations. However, it is the position of this paper that silence can also be used tactfully to renegotiate one's position. Indeed, silence can be and is frequently used by women as a socially embedded tactic to nonconfrontationally assert oneself and reclaim lost power. This is more so in situations where cultural norms and values openly and stringently teach otherwise as is the case in some of the still deeply patriarchal societies in Africa. Here, males enjoy unbridled social-culturally assigned power and privilege and constructions of masculinity encourage the subordination and control of women by men. Excesses such as the use of violence and other oppressive practices against women are not only tolerated but also tacitly encouraged, as necessary for 'putting women in their place' and maintaining male authority.
The premise of this paper is that even in such situations of extreme male domination and female subordination, women do not necessarily withstand such oppression passively but rather do exercise some form of agency, often in subtle and insidious ways, to counteract the oppression or...