ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on the silence–speech dichotomy in feminist security studies, mapping the politics of gender, agency and the politics of subjectivity. Silence and speech have been crucial to feminist security studies since its start in the late 1980s. Feminist scholars argued that women – and later men – face security problems because of their gender, for example as victims of wartime sexual violence, and that these problems have been marginalized by governments and international institutions. Feminist security studies scholars argued further that listening to women’s experiences of insecurity is necessary for understanding how insecurity is lived and felt. Speech is crucial for communicating the experience of insecurity, yet the “silent security dilemma” – when pointing to a threat to one’s security puts one at further risk – might make it dangerous to speak. This has epistemological implications: it is not sufficient to rely on a discursive epistemology, but it is also problematic to make the feminist researcher the interpreter of the silence of others. This chapter provides an attempt to rethink silence such that it might be agentic rather than a lack or an absence, and suggests that offering multiple readings of silence might be a valuable epistemological strategy. The chapter explores the potential of this strategy through three readings of the comic book La Frontière Invisible by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters.
