Abstract

The question posed by Gayatri Spivak still echoes and requires epistemological attention: can the subordinate speak? Many feminists have been saying yes: she can and she speaks. However, there is an essential difficulty: sometimes, the listener's grammar does not understand her statement, but she certainly speaks. At other times, feminist research raises another question: she speaks, but is anyone listening? Of course there is always an audience for the women's speeches and voices. However, to what extend are these told, spoken, stated subjectivities, through their words and texts' variants and specificities, structuring agents or, in other words, how can they be understood as active deconstructions of the centres, or even: creators of multiple centralities.

This workshop aims at analysing and discussing two distinct texts which provide this feminist debate with the possibility of questioning oneself in different times and feeding critical epistemologies. The first text, by Belinda Bozzoli, ‘Introduction: oral history, consciousness, and gender’, from the book Women of Phokeng. Consciousness, life strategy, and migrancy in South-Africa, 1900-1983, confronts us with the following question: what happens to female subjectivities when oppressed, silenced, marginalized in contexts of extreme unbalance between the structure that overdetermines and the agency that resists? Is the subordinate's subjectivity still able to speak? How and where? Can these subjectivities and their words, barely known and acknowledged, be carriers of feminist energy and strength)

The second text to be studied and discussed arises from a different perspective and belongs to Laura Cavalcante Padilha, ‘Silêncios rompidos’, a chapter from the book Novos pactos, outras ficções: ensaios sobre literaturas afro-luso-brasileiras. This text serves to analyse the possibility that women's spoken and written words, even if in a context of deep silencing because it is doubly colonial - a mother country occupying the land and the man occupying the woman - can be, besides silence breakers, energy, strength and power for decolonizing thought. These textualities brought by women are performances, other makings, which epistemologically occupy and recreate history about oneself and the world.

Short biography

Teresa Cunha is Professor at the Coimbra College of Education and holds a PhD in Sociology by the University of Coimbra. Her research interests include the post-colonial feminist political economy.

TEXTS TO BE DISCUSSED:
- Bozzoli, Belinda (1991), “Introduction: oral history, consciousness, and gender”, in  Belinda Bozzoli, Women of Phokeng. Consciousness, life strategy, and migrancy in South-Africa, 1900-1983". London: James Curry Ltd, 1 – 15.

- Padilha, Laura Cavalcanti (2002), "Silêncios rompidos" in Laura Cavalcanti Padilha, Novos pactos, outras ficções: ensaios sobre literaturas afro-luso-brasileiras. Novo Imbondeiro, 157-172.


Organization: Gisele Wolkoff, Júlia Garraio (NHUMEP) and Mihaela Mihai (DECIDe).
 

Note: The «Gender Workshop Series» is a space for discussion about one or two texts on gender which takes place once a month.