Scholarly discourse can itself silence and wound marginalized participants

Evidence

Despite this reality, the logic that Muslim women are oppressed and therefore need to be rescued by the West continues to hold ground. The Islamic veil has been the subject of much controversy. Seen ubiquitously as a symbol of Muslim women’s oppression, the veil has been banned, scorned, or otherwise used to advance the aforementioned colonial argument. In April 2011, the French government recycled this argument when it banned women from wearing the veil in public—running roughshod over religious freedom in the process. Absent from this discourse are the voices of Muslim women themselves, who could construct an alternative narrative—one which speaks to a self-conscious choice made by autonomous individuals. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 167 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

I had studied the history of art and was used to describing and analysing art. But what I never wrote about, and this is all that matters, was the experience of it. Not just because I couldn’t, but also because the feelings the pictures evoked in me went against everything I had learned about what art was and what it was for. So I kept it to myself. I wandered around the Nationalgalleri in Stockholm or the Nasjonalgalleri in Oslo or the National Gallery in London and looked. There was a kind of freedom about this. I didn’t need to justify my feelings, there was no one to whom I had to stand to account and no case to answer. Freedom, but not peace, for even though the pictures were supposed to be idylls, such as Claude’s archaic landscapes, I was always unsettled when I left them because what they possessed, the core of their being, was inexhaustibility, and what that wrought in me was a kind of desire. I can’t explain it any better than that. A desire to be inside the inexhaustibility. — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 1135 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Universalizing discourse silences the specific wounds of the colonized.; Art’s felt experience is suppressed by learned critical discourse — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 1135; The veil ban discourse silences Muslim women’s own autonomous voices — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 167 (+9 more)

Related

• The veil ban discourse silences Muslim women’s own autonomous voices (similarity 0.83)
• Muslim women veil for varied personal-political reasons silenced by rescue discourse (similarity 0.79)
• Veiling discourse excludes women’s own varied motives for wearing it (similarity 0.78)
• Comparisons of Muslim-region misogyny can silence domestic feminist debate. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Universalizing discourse silences the specific wounds of the colonized. #corroborates (0.85)
• The veil ban discourse silences Muslim women’s own autonomous voices #exemplifies (0.80) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 167
• Art’s felt experience is suppressed by learned critical discourse #exemplifies (0.70) — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 1135
• Subordinated regimes of truth sustain plausibility for oppressed subjects #corroborates (0.65)