Speech and Space

Speech is both liberating and restrictive. Alcoff and Gray use Foucault’s thoughts on speech as a site of struggle to highlight its complexities. It has the power to transform subjectivities, but also inscribes identities within hegemonic structures. “Speaking out”, thus, is doubly bound, because individual speech can either be empowering (through its subversion and transgression) or oppressive, recuperated by dominant discourse and institutionalized by “experts” (knowledge producers) and media. Alcoff and Gray argue that structures of speech, such as who is the speaker and who is the listener, mediate our subjectivities and change depending on the discursive event’s context. “Normative arrangements” have usually dictated that men have been in traditional roles of the speaker, with women and children usually positioned as the listeners. Foucault regards speech as being part of “discourse”, which are different possible arrangements of speech acts. Foucault argues that speech is not made up of what is “true” and “false”, but instead focused on what is “stateable”, or has “truth-value”(Alcoff and Gray). Discourses work by exclusion, and normalization happens through defining what is anything other than “dominant”, hegemonic discourse. This includes “mad”, “untrue”, and “repressed” speech. Sexual survivor speech, Alcoff and Gray argue, is usually interpreted through the former two categories, being regarded as either unfathomable or false. If survivor discourse is spoken (and not silenced all-together), it is dismissed of its subversive and disruptive potential to be recuperated into dominant discourse. 

Alcoff and Gray’s article brings up questions such as, “who gets to speak survivor discourse?” and “where does it take place?” that I’d like to address in this blog post.  I would like to connect Alcoff and Gray’s exploration of “speaking out” and disruptive discursive acts to Razack’s idea of spaces, history, and justice. Razack points out in her analysis of the Pamela George case that certain bodies occupy certain spaces, marked as either “respectable” or “degenerate” (127). We come to learn our own positioning within these spaces through our movement between them, and this participates in the production of our individual subjectivity. It is a simultaneous process of constituting the spaces we inhabit (through our movement between and within these spaces) at the same time as being constituted by our spaces through the inscription of dominant, hegemonic structures and discourses.

Dominant discourse operates in all spaces, but its specific speech arrangements are likely to vary depending on the space and the bodies that inhabit the space where speech takes place. For example, “other” types of speech that exist in opposition to dominant discourse such as “mad”, “untrue” and “repressed” speech are often deeply gendered (as Alcoff and Gray point out) but they can also be recognized as frequently racialized. Therefore, aligning with Razack’s argument, racialized bodies (and their speech acts) are often spatially located. So not only do individual bodies define (and are defined by) the spaces in which they exist, but their speech acts, too, are embedded in the same process. I think this forces us to reexamine what counts as “subversive” or “disruptive” speech and how this might change when different bodies, in certain spaces, speak out. What kinds of speech acts are available within degenerate and respectable spaces, and how does their potential for transgression differ depending on who does the speaking?