Silence: A predicament for feminist anthropology and social innovation

This article aims to describe how contemporary societies dominated by racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy view and treat silence as an emptiness to be avoided. Without denying the importance of breaking from the silence of oppression, I argue that the dialectic between norms and silences is at the foundation of sociocultural life. Moreover, silence in feminist theory can be understood as a form of décrochage (lit. “unhooking”) from hegemonic norms, thus opening spaces of doubt and questioning (or spaces of vraisemblance). Dwelling in these spaces, which I believe is the predicament of feminist anthropology, allows us to craft the sociocultural, artistic, and theoretical tools to engage in a state of becoming and emancipation.