ABSTRACT
This chapter explores relevant Chinese and international scholarship focused on debates over the relationship between two core feminist notions: silence and voice. Silence is treated as a multifaceted and relational construct that incorporates aspects of voice, and of coming-to-voice; silence is also both a foundational and continued (potent) presence in the moment of voicing. This interpretive framework translates the long history of an expanding presence of women's institutions of worship, celebration, and education (in women's mosques) – conventionally understood as a trajectory from muted to liberated voice – as instead steeped in interdependence, as situated in a symbiotic relationship between silence and voice. Understanding how silence(s) perform(s) at multiple levels of discursive communication is to highlight the complexity of societal relationships and ambiguities of assigned social classifications.
