Gender Stories Aff

7/29/2019 Gender Stories Aff

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Gender Stories aff


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Cards for long 1ac story for 4 min, cards for 4 min

Personal story for 4 min

My story is unfortunately very common, the truth is women consistently suffer in

debate, the truth hurts

Womens Debate Institute, 10[http://womensdebateinstitute.org/faqs#computer]

The Womens Debate Institutes (WDI) mission is to close the gender gap in debate. There is statistical

documentation that men outnumber women at every level of debate competition. There are many

reasons for such inequality: differences in communication styles, competition from other activities,

and explicit harassment . A hostile environment, even when that hostility is infrequent, can

contribute to a higher attrition rate for females versus males creating a vicious cycle. Women leavethe activity, so fewer women debate in college than in high school, resulting in fewer successful

female debaters and fewer female coaches. Ultimately, there are insufficient female role models for

high school girls to emulate. The Womens Debate Institute was created to increase the proportion of

girls and women of all races in debate by helping young women develop debate skills, and by creating a

community of women to whom students can look for models of success. By bringing together young

women from around the country, less experienced debaters are exposed to successful, experienced

debaters who can act as role models. Successful experienced debaters can network with a community of

women while working one-on-one with top debaters and coaches. We hope our students will never feel

lonely on the circuit and will have friends and mentors to turn to for support. While the size of the WDI

may seem modest, exposure to one outstanding female debater can have a lasting impression on

dozens of other girls who are uncertain about their debate future.

And Women in debate are forced to lose their own confidence and identity to fit into

the biased system

Jess Zolt-Gilburne 02[http://www.jstor.org/stable/20837579]

Women face all sorts of issues on their debate teams. In addition to being excluded socially (because

people of opposite gender do not share hotel rooms), many women also speak of frustrations with

research assignments or opportunities. We often feel that we are given an argument solely because "a

woman should research that issue," or that we are excluded from a tournament because our debate

coaches think that making arrangements to bring one woman to a tournament would be too difficult.

Because policy debate is an experience-driven activity,missing out on opportunities to compete orengage in research as a result of our gender puts us at a serious competitive disadvantage. Some of us

feel that our unease and marginalization on our teams makes it hard for us to focus on the

competition. As a result, we may feel uneasy in rounds, overshadowed by our male partners who can

compete without fear of sexism. Sometimes female debaters are referred to as "he" or "him." This

gendered language marginalizes female competitors by reducing our identity. We are not women. In

debate, there are only men and people who are "not men." Gendered language is rampant in the


3/26

quotes from academic papers and various media used by policy debaters to support their assertions.

The pronoun "he" is used almost exclusively.

And Female debaters are significantly devalued

Jess Zolt-Gilburne 02

[http://www.jstor.org/stable/20837579]Policy Debate is the most common type of secondary school forensics in the United States. There are

policy debate teams in almost all of the major cities. Almost all 50 states send representatives to the

National Forensic League tournament every June. Policy Debaters debate with a partner from their own

team against two people from another team. There is a set topic for the year and partners take turns

defending and arguing against that topic. The Debate Community is generally considered to be one of

the more enlightened and liberal communities in competitive high school activities. Yet sexism is still

prevalent. I have known female debaters who have had judges tell them how hot they are, or criticize

the higher pitch of their voices. One student that I worked with told me that her coach would only

spend money on the males because females were "never good enough for him.

Sometimes I feel that as a woman in debate, I am not an equal competitor, but rather I am part of the

arguments. My male opponents run feminism arguments on me because the policy options that Isuggest may contradict the philosophical claims of second wave feminists. Yet here I am, a young, third

wave feminist. And my experience and ambitions can't be wrapped up in a neat little box in an eight

minute argument.

And Sexism is disregarded in debate, we need to examine the way we think in order to

have real change

DAS (Debaters Against Sexism) 13[www.debatersagainstsexism.org]

We are tired of online discussions about gender disparities in debate dying out without resulting in

any concrete changes. We are tired of sexism becoming the talk of the day, and then fading away aspeople settle back into their normal routines of cutting cards and trying to win tournaments. We are

tired of waiting for someone else to do something, so we are taking a stand now. The biggest

problem is not that tournament rules are written to disadvantage women, or that workshop and

institute policies dont account for sexual harassment (although policies lacking enforcement are

meaningless). The biggest problem is the way that we as a community behave. Gender discrimination

is so prevalent because we fail to embrace mature dialogue, underestimate the power of disparaging

remarks, and stigmatize victims. We need to examine the way we think and behave as a community;

no real change can occur until we do.

Sharing Narratives is key to relating experiences of injustice that otherwise cannot beshared this is crucial to cross-cultural communication, and a reexamination of our

current mode of thinking which is necessary for real change

Young,Professor of Political Science, 2000 [Iris Marion, Inclusion and Democracy, p.70-7]Another mode of expression, narrative, serves important functions in democratic communication, to

foster understanding among members of a polity with very different experience or assumptions about

what is important. In recent years a number of legal theorists have turned to narrative as a means of

giving voice to kinds of experience which often go unheard in legal discussions and courtroom settings,


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and as a means of challenging the idea that law expresses an impartial and neutral standpoint above all

particular perspectives. Some legal theorists discuss the way that storytelling in the legal context

functions to challenge a hegemonic view and express the particularity of experience to which the law

ought to respond but often does not. Several scholars of Latin American literature offer another variant

of a theory of the political function of storytelling, in their reflections on testimonio. Some resistance

movement leaders in Central and South America narrate their life stories as a means of exposing to the

wider literate world the oppression of their people and the repression they suffer from their

governments. Often such testimonios involve one persons story standing or speaking for that of a

whole group to a wider, sometimes global, public, and making claims upon that public for the group.

This raises important questions about how a particular persons story can speak for others, and whether

speaking to the literate First World public changes the construction of the story.22 While these are

important questions, here I wish only to indicate a debt to both of these literatures, and analyse these

insights with an account of some of the political functions of storytelling. Suppose we in a public want to

make arguments to justify proposals for how to solve our collective problems or resolve our conflicts

justly. In order to proceed, those of us engaged in meaningful political discussion and debate must share

many things. We must share a description of the problem, share an idiom in which to express alternative

proposals, share rules of evidence and prediction, and share some normative principles which can serve

as premisses in our arguments about what ought to be done. When all these conditions exist, then wecan engage in reasonable disagreement. Fortunately, in most political disputes these conditions are met

in some respect and to some degree, but for many political disputes they are not met in other respects

and degrees. When these conditions for meaningful argument do not obtain, does this mean that we

must or should resort to a mere power contest or to some other arbitrary decision procedure? I say not,

Where we lack shared understandings in crucial respects, sometimes forms of communication other

than argument can speak across our differences to promote understanding. I take the use of narrative

in political communication to be one important such mode. Political narrative differs from other forms

of narrative by its intent and its audience context. I tell the story not primarily to entertain or reveal

myself, but to make a pointto demonstrate, describe, explain, or justify something to others in an

ongoing political discussion. Political narrative furthers discussion across difference in several ways.

Response to the differend. Chapter 1 discussed how a radical injustice can occur when those whosuffer a wrongful harm or oppression lack the terms to express a claim of injustice within the

prevailing normative discourse. Those who suffer this wrong are excluded from the polity, at least with

respect to that wrong. Lyotard calls this situation the differend. How can a group that suffers a particular

harm or oppression move from a situation of total silencing and exclusion with respect to this suffering

to its public expression? Storytelling is often an important bridge in such cases between the mute

experience of being wronged and political arguments about justice. Those who experience the wrong,

and perhaps some others who sense it, may have no language for expressing the suffering as an

injustice, but nevertheless they can tell stories that relate a sense of wrong. As people tell such stories

publicly within and between groups, discursive reflection on them then develops a normative

language that names their injustice and can give a general account of why this kind of suffering

constitutes an injustice. A process something like this occurred in the United States and elsewhere in

the 1970s and 1980s, as injustice we now call sexual harassment gradually came into public discussion.

Women had long experienced the stress, fear, pain, and humiliation in their workplace that courts today

name as a specific harm. Before the language and theory of sexual harassment was invented, however,

women usually suffered in silence, without a language or forum in which to make a reasonable

complaint. As a result of women telling stories to each other and to wider publics about their treatment

by men on the job and the consequences of this treatment, however, a problem that had no name was

gradually identified and named, and a social moral and legal theory about the problem developed.

Facilitation of local publics and articulation of collective affinities. Political communication in mass


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democratic societies hardly ever consists in all the people affected by an issue assembling together in a

single forum to discuss it. Instead, political debate is widely dispersed in space and time, and takes place

within and between many smaller publics. By a local public I mean a collective of persons allied within

the wider polity with respect to particular interests, opinions, and/or social positions.23 Storytelling is

often an important means by which members of such collectives identify one another, and identify the

basis of their affinity. The narrative exchanges give reflective, voice to situated experiences and help

affinity groupings give an account of their own individual identities in relation to their social

positioning and their affinities with others.24 Once in formation, people in local publics often use

narrative as means of politicizing their situation, by reflecting on the extent to which they experience

similar problems and what political remedy for them they might propose. Examples of such local

publics emerging from reflective stories include the processes of consciousness-raising in which some

people in the womens movement engaged, and which brought out problems of battering or sexual

harassment where these were not yet recognized as problems. Understanding the experience of others

and countering preunderstandings. Storytelling is often the only vehicle for understanding the

particular experiences of those in particular social situations, experiences not shared by those

situated differently, but which they must understand in order to do justice.25

And We must radically change the educational sphere, our performance is an act of

liberation, visibility, and empowerment, creating a public space for dissent and

challenges

Mohanty 03*Chandra Talpade, Ph.D. and Masters degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as

well as a Master's degree and a bachelor's degree from the University of Delhi in India. Originally a

professor of women's studies at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, she is currently the women's

studies department chair at Syracuse University, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory,

Practicing Solidarity, Duke University Press p. 205-207]

In the intellectual, political and historical context I have sketched thus far, decolonization as a method of

teaching and learning is crucial in envisioning democratic education. My own political project involvestrying to connect educational discourse to questions of social justice and the creation of citizens who are

able to conceive of a democracy which is not the same as "the free market." Pedagogy in this context

needs to be revolutionary to combat business as usual in educational institutions. After all, the politics

of commodification allows the cooptation of most dissenting voices in this age of multiculturalism.

Cultures of dissent are hard to create. Revolutionary pedagogy needs to lead to a consciousness of

injustice, self-reflection on the routines and habits of education in the creation of an "educated

citizen," and action to transform one's social space in a collective setting. In other words, the practice

of decolonization as defined above. I turn now to a narrative in the tradition of Toni Cade Bambara, a

story that "keeps me alive - a story which saves our lives." The story is about a performance by a student

at Hamilton College. Yance Ford, an African American studio art major and feminist activist, based her

performance, called "This Invisible World," on her three-plus years as a student at the college." She builtan iron cage that enclosed her snugly, suspended it ten feet off the ground in the lobby of the social

sciences building, She shaved her head and - barefoot and without a watch, wearing a sheet that she

had cut up-spent five hours in the cage in total silence. The performance required unimaginable physical

and psychic endurance, and it dramatically transformed a physical space that is usually a corridor

between offices and classrooms. It had an enormous impact on everyone walking through - no mundane

response was possible. Nor was business as usual possible. It disrupted educational routines - many

faculty(including me) sent their classes to the performance and later attempted discussions that proved


6/26

profoundly unsettling. For the first time in myexperience at Hamilton, students, faculty, and staff were

faced with a performance that could not be "consumed~ or assimilated as part of the "normal"

educational process. We were faced with the knowledge that it was impossible to "know" what led to

such a performance, and that the knowledge we had, of black women's history of objectification, of

slavery, invisibility, and soon, was a radically inadequate measure of the intent or courage and risk it

took for Vance to perform "This Invisible World. ~ In talking at length with Vance, other students, and

colleagues, and thinking through the effects of this performance on the campus, I have realized that this

is potentially a very effective story. Here is how Vance, writing in October 1993, described her project:

What is it? I guess or rather I know that it is about survival. About trauma, about loss, about suffering

and pain, and about being lost within all of those things. About trying to find the way back to yourself

The way back to your sanity, a way to get away from those things which have driven you beyond a point

of recognition. Past the point where you no longer recognize or even want to recognize yourself or your

past or the possibility that your present may also be your future. That is what my project is about. I call it

refuge but I really think I mean rescue or even better, survival, escape, saved. My work to me is about all

the things that push you to the edge. Its about not belonging, not liking yourself, not loving yourself, not

feeling loved or safe or accepted or tolerated or respected or valued or useful or important or

comfortable or safe or part of a larger community. It's about how all these things cause us TO hate

ourselves into corners and boxes and addictions and traps and hurtful relationships and cages. It's abouthow people can see you and look right through you. Most of the time nor knowing you are there. It is

about fighting the battle of your life, for your life. And this place that I call refuge is the only place where

I am sacred. It is the source ofmystrength, myfortitude, my resilience, myability to be for myself what

no one else will ever be for me. This is most directly Vance's response and meditation on her three years

at a liberal arts college-on her education. In extensive conversations with her, two aspects of this project

became clearer to me: her consciousness of being colonized at the college, expressed through the act of

being caged like animals in a science experiment, ~ and the performance as an act of liberation, of

active decolonization of the self, of visibility and empowerment. Vance found a way to tell another

story, to speak through a silence that screamed for engagement. However, in doing so, she also

created a public space for the collective narratives of marginalized peoples, especially other women of

color. Educational practices became the object of public critique as the hegemonic narrative of aliberal arts education, and its markers of success came under collective scrutiny. This was then a

profoundly unsettling and radically decolonizing educational act. This story illustrates the difference

between thinking about social justice and radical transformation in our frames of analysis and

understanding in relation to race, gender, class, and sexuality versus a multiculturalist consumption

and assimilation into a supposedly democratic" frame of education as usual. It suggests the need to

organize to create collective spaces for dissent and challenges to consolidation of white heterosexual

masculinity in academy.


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Women in Debate

Women suffer in debate

Womens Debate Institute, 10[http://womensdebateinstitute.org/faqs#computer]

The Womens Debate Institutes (WDI) mission is to close the gender gap in debate. There is statistical

documentation that men outnumber women at every level of debate competition. There are many

reasons for such inequality: differences in communication styles, competition from other activities,

and explicit harassment . A hostile environment, even when that hostility is infrequent, can

contribute to a higher attrition rate for females versus males creating a vicious cycle. Women leave

the activity, so fewer women debate in college than in high school, resulting in fewer successful

female debaters and fewer female coaches. Ultimately, there are insufficient female role models for

high school girls to emulate. The Womens Debate Institute was created to increase the proportion of

girls and women of all races in debate by helping young women develop debate skills, and by creating acommunity of women to whom students can look for models of success. By bringing together young

women from around the country, less experienced debaters are exposed to successful, experienced

debaters who can act as role models. Successful experienced debaters can network with a community of

women while working one-on-one with top debaters and coaches. We hope our students will never feel

lonely on the circuit and will have friends and mentors to turn to for support. While the size of the WDI

may seem modest, exposure to one outstanding female debater can have a lasting impression on

dozens of other girls who are uncertain about their debate future.


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Female debaters become victims of misogyny

Louise Wilson, 13[http://glasglowguardian.co.uk/2013/03/04/female-debaters-victims-of-misogyny-at-guu/]

Two female speakers, who had made it to the Final of this years GUU Ancients Debate, were reduced

to tears after a number of misogynistic comments were yelled out by hecklers in the audience.

Marlena Valles, recently named Scotlands best speaker, and Rebecca Meredith, who is rankedamongst the worlds best speakers, were both booed during their speeches at the annual GUU

Ancients Debating Championship. Members of the audience also repeatedly yelled shame women

and objectified the two women based on their appearance. A former President and other prominent

members within the Union are amongst those known to have been making the comments.

When Pam Cohn and Kitty Parker-Brooks, two of the judges of the competition, openly condemned

the sexist comments being made, the two were also attacked . Hecklers were heard to ask what

qualifications the women had to allow them to sit on the judging panel. A member of the GUU was

subsequently called over in an attempt to stop the sexist heckling, but the member simply replied it

is just how they are and to leaveitalone.


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Women are just recognized as not male.


The halls are gray and institutional in a suburban New York High School, which 200 High School Policy

debaters are calling home for the weekend. In this sea of a people two young men catch my

eye. They are chatting about their last debate rounds, when one of them asks, "so did you win?" Theother one smiles and responds, "You bet. We raped them." Suddenly I realize those three words

encapsulate so much of what the high school debate experience is like for women. Rape is an intensely

emotional and significant word for women, as it is for many men. It is a word that is charged. It carries a

specific connotation and meaning. To hear it used to describe something as trivial as the victor in a

given debate round is to belittle an experience that hurts the core of who I am as a woman. Yet these

two men can throw it around without thinking twice, because to them, it doesn't represent anything

more than terminology to describe their exclusive fraternitythe policy debate community. In this

world of intense rhetoric and competition, there are no women:

There are only men and people who are "not men." Who I am is defined by who I am not, not by who

I am. In a predominantly male community, like the high school policy debate community, many men still

see women as sex objects, not as peers.

Female debaters are significantly devalued


Policy Debate is the most common type of secondary school forensics in the United States. There are

policy debate teams in almost all of the major cities. Almost all 50 states send representatives to the

National Forensic League tournament every June. Policy Debaters debate with a partner from their own

team against two people from another team. There is a set topic for the year and partners take turns

defending and arguing against that topic. The Debate Community is generally considered to be one of

the more enlightened and liberal communities in competitive high school activities. Yet sexism is still

prevalent. I have known female debaters who have had judges tell them how hot they are, or criticize

the higher pitch of their voices. One student that I worked with told me that her coach would onlyspend money on the males because females were "never good enough for him.

Sometimes I feel that as a woman in debate, I am not an equal competitor, but rather I am part of the

arguments. My male opponents run feminism arguments on me because the policy options that I

suggest may contradict the philosophical claims of second wave feminists. Yet here I am, a young, third

wave feminist. And my experience and ambitions can't be wrapped up in a neat little box in an eight

minute argument.

Women are forced to lose their own confidence and identity

Jess Zolt-Gilburne 02

[http://www.jstor.org/stable/20837579]Women face all sorts of issues on their debate teams. In addition to being excluded socially (because

people of opposite gender do not share hotel rooms), many women also speak of frustrations with

research assignments or opportunities. We often feel that we are given an argument solely because "a

woman should research that issue," or that we are excluded from a tournament because our debate

coaches think that making arrangements to bring one woman to a tournament would be too difficult.

Because policy debate is an experience-driven activity,missing out on opportunities to compete or

engage in research as a result of our gender puts us at a serious competitive disadvantage. Some of us


11/26

feel that our unease and marginalization on our teams makes it hard for us to focus on the

competition. As a result, we may feel uneasy in rounds, overshadowed by our male partners who can

compete without fear of sexism. Sometimes female debaters are referred to as "he" or "him." This

gendered language marginalizes female competitors by reducing our identity. We are not women. In

debate, there are only men and people who are "not men." Gendered language is rampant in the

quotes from academic papers and various media used by policy debaters to support their assertions.

The pronoun "he" is used almost exclusively.

Women are discouraged and not taken seriously

Allison Pickett[debate.uvm.edu/nfl/rostrumlib/ldpickett%20and%20Scott0202.pdf]

In the fall of 1994, my debate career nearly ended as quickly as it had begun. Lord knows I was

already nervous enough as I stood outside the classroom, waiting for my very first debate round to

begin. Never mind the fact that I had three (!) more to do before I could go home and cry, the

only thing I could imagine doing after what promised to be one of the most mortifying days of my

life. (Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I think I may have had a self-confidence problem.) I was on the brink

of emotional meltdownand then, it happened Whew! Hey baby, whats your name? I need your

number. And so it went. For twenty minutes outside the room and then throughout the entire round.

No, you cant be a freshman, youve gotta be a junioror even myjudgewhere did you get

those eyes? Aw, honey, dont be scared, Im just going to ask you a few easy questions. Could I

really cross-examine someone with such beautiful eyes as yours? Did I mention the starring,

perhaps better termed leering? Im not kidding; I was ready to quit debate forever after round one.

Sexism is disregarded in debate

DAS (Debaters Against Sexism) 13[www.debatersagainstsexism.org]

We are tired of online discussions about gender disparities in debate dying out without resulting in

any concrete changes. We are tired of sexism becoming the talk of the day, and then fading away as

people settle back into their normal routines of cutting cards and trying to win tournaments. We are

tired of waiting for someone else to do something, so we are taking a stand now. The biggest

problem is not that tournament rules are written to disadvantage women, or that workshop and

institute policies dont account for sexual harassment (although policies lacking enforcement are

meaningless). The biggest problem is the way that we as a community behave. Gender discrimination

is so prevalent because we fail to embrace mature dialogue, underestimate the power of disparaging

remarks, and stigmatize victims. We need to examine the way we think and behave as a community;

no real change can occur until we do.


12/26

Solvency/ Framework

The purpose of the critique is to be an instrument for those who fight. It causes the

old ways of doing things to be questioned and changed. Demands for top down policy

options over determine the purpose of the critique, rendering it useless.

Michel Foucault, Some Dead French Guy, 1991, The Foucault Effect, pp. 83-85We have known at least since the nineteenth century the difference between anaesthesis and paralysis.

Let's talk about paralysis first. Who has been paralyzed? Do you think what I wrote on the history of

psychiatry paralyzed those people who had already been concerned for some time about what was

happening in psychiatric institutions? And, seeing what has been happening in and around prisons, I

don't think the effect of paralysis is very evident there either. As far as the people in prison are

concerned, things aren't doing too badly. On the other hand, it's true that certain people, such as those

who work in the institutional setting of the prisonwhich is not quite the same as being in prisonare

not likely to find advice or instructions in my books that tell them 'what is to be done'. But my project

is precisely to bring it about that they 'no longer know what to do', so that the acts, gestures,

discourses which up until then had seemed to go without saying become problematic, difficult,

dangerous. This effect is intentional. And then I have some news for you: for me the problem of the

prisons isn't one for the 'social workers' but one for the prisoners. And on that side, I'm not so sure

what's been said over the last fifteen years has been quite sohow shall I put it?demobilizing.

But paralysis isn't the same thing as anaesthesison the contrary. It's in so far as there's been an

awakening to a whole series of problems that the difficulty of doing anything comes to be felt. Not

that this effect is an end in itself. But it seems to me that 'what is to be done' ought not to be

determined from above by reformers, be they prophetic or legislative, but by a long work of comings

and goings, of exchanges, reflections, trials, different analyses. If the social workers you are talking

about don't know which way to turn, this just goes to show that they're looking, and hence are not

anaesthetized or sterilized at allon the contrary. And it's because of the need not to tie them downor immobilize them that there can be no question for me of trying to tell 'what is to be done'. If the

questions posed by the social workers you spoke of are going to assume their full amplitude, the most

important thing is not to bury them under the weight of prescriptive, prophetic discourse. The

necessity of reform mustn't be allowed to become a form of blackmail serving to limit, reduce or halt

the exercise of criticism. Under no circumstances should one pay attention to those who tell one:

'Don't criticize, since you're not capable of carrying out a reform.' That's ministerial cabinet talk.

Critique doesn't have to be the premise of a deduction which concludes: this then is what needs to be

done. It should be an instrument for those who fight, those who resist and refuse what is. Its use

should be in processes of conflict and confrontation, essays in refusal. It doesn't have to lay down the

law for the law. It isn't a stage in a programming. It is a challenge directed to what is. The problem,

you see, is one for the subject who actsthe subject of action through which the real is transformed.If prisons and punitive mechanisms are transformed, it won't be because a plan of reform has found its

way into the heads of the social workers; it will be when those who have to do with that penal reality,

all those people, have come into collision with each other and with themselves, run into dead-ends,

problems and impossibilities, been through conflicts and confrontations; when critique has been

played out in the real, not when reformers have realized their ideas.


13/26

We must radically change the educational sphere, our performance is an act of

liberation, visibility, and empowerment, creating a public space for dissent and

challenges


well as a Master's degree and a bachelor's degree from the University of Delhi in India. Originally aprofessor of women's studies at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, she is currently the women's



In the intellectual, political and historical context I have sketched thus far, decolonization as a method of

teaching and learning is crucial in envisioning democratic education. My own political project involves

trying to connect educational discourse to questions of social justice and the creation of citizens who are

able to conceive of a democracy which is not the same as "the free market." Pedagogy in this context

needs to be revolutionary to combat business as usual in educational institutions. After all, the politics

of commodification allows the cooptation of most dissenting voices in this age of multiculturalism.

Cultures of dissent are hard to create. Revolutionary pedagogy needs to lead to a consciousness of

injustice, self-reflection on the routines and habits of education in the creation of an "educatedcitizen," and action to transform one's social space in a collective setting. In other words, the practice

of decolonization as defined above. I turn now to a narrative in the tradition of Toni Cade Bambara, a

story that "keeps me alive - a story which saves our lives." The story is about a performance by a student

at Hamilton College. Yance Ford, an African American studio art major and feminist activist, based her

performance, called "This Invisible World," on her three-plus years as a student at the college." She built

an iron cage that enclosed her snugly, suspended it ten feet off the ground in the lobby of the social

sciences building, She shaved her head and - barefoot and without a watch, wearing a sheet that she

had cut up-spent five hours in the cage in total silence. The performance required unimaginable physical

and psychic endurance, and it dramatically transformed a physical space that is usually a corridor

between offices and classrooms. It had an enormous impact on everyone walking through - no mundane

response was possible. Nor was business as usual possible. It disrupted educational routines - many

faculty(including me) sent their classes to the performance and later attempted discussions that proved

profoundly unsettling. For the first time in myexperience at Hamilton, students, faculty, and staff were

faced with a performance that could not be "consumed~ or assimilated as part of the "normal"

educational process. We were faced with the knowledge that it was impossible to "know" what led to

such a performance, and that the knowledge we had, of black women's history of objectification, of

slavery, invisibility, and soon, was a radically inadequate measure of the intent or courage and risk it

took for Vance to perform "This Invisible World. ~ In talking at length with Vance, other students, and

colleagues, and thinking through the effects of this performance on the campus, I have realized that this

is potentially a very effective story. Here is how Vance, writing in October 1993, described her project:

What is it? I guess or rather I know that it is about survival. About trauma, about loss, about suffering

and pain, and about being lost within all of those things. About trying to find the way back to yourself

The way back to your sanity, a way to get away from those things which have driven you beyond a pointof recognition. Past the point where you no longer recognize or even want to recognize yourself or your

past or the possibility that your present may also be your future. That is what my project is about. I call it

refuge but I really think I mean rescue or even better, survival, escape, saved. My work to me is about all

the things that push you to the edge. Its about not belonging, not liking yourself, not loving yourself, not

feeling loved or safe or accepted or tolerated or respected or valued or useful or important or

comfortable or safe or part of a larger community. It's about how all these things cause us TO hate

ourselves into corners and boxes and addictions and traps and hurtful relationships and cages. It's about


14/26

how people can see you and look right through you. Most of the time nor knowing you are there. It is

about fighting the battle of your life, for your life. And this place that I call refuge is the only place where

I am sacred. It is the source ofmystrength, myfortitude, my resilience, myability to be for myself what

no one else will ever be for me. This is most directly Vance's response and meditation on her three years

at a liberal arts college-on her education. In extensive conversations with her, two aspects of this project

became clearer to me: her consciousness of being colonized at the college, expressed through the act of

being caged like animals in a science experiment, ~ and the performance as an act of liberation, of

active decolonization of the self, of visibility and empowerment. Vance found a way to tell another

story, to speak through a silence that screamed for engagement. However, in doing so, she also

created a public space for the collective narratives of marginalized peoples, especially other women of

color. Educational practices became the object of public critique as the hegemonic narrative of a

liberal arts education, and its markers of success came under collective scrutiny. This was then a

profoundly unsettling and radically decolonizing educational act. This story illustrates the difference

between thinking about social justice and radical transformation in our frames of analysis and

understanding in relation to race, gender, class, and sexuality versus a multiculturalist consumption

and assimilation into a supposedly democratic" frame of education as usual. It suggests the need to

organize to create collective spaces for dissent and challenges to consolidation of white heterosexual

masculinity in academy.

Opening up public space for epistemological standpoints is fundamental to the

exposure of power relations we must make the politics of everyday experience

important






If my argument in this essay is convincing, it suggests why we need to take on questions of race andgender as they are being managed and commodified in the liberal U.S. academy. One mode of doing

this is actively creating public cultures of dissent where these issues can be debated in terms of our

pedagogics and institutional practices.20 Creating such cultures in the liberal academy is a challenge in

itself, because liberalism allows and even welcomes "plural~ or even "alternative" perspectives.

However, a public culture of dissent entails creating spaces for epistemological standpoints that are

grounded in the interests of people and that recognize the materiality of conflict, of privilege, and of

domination. Thus creating such cultures is fundamentally about making the axes of power transparent

in the context of academic, disciplinary, and institutional structures as well as in the interpersonal

relationships (rather than individual relations) in the academy. It is about taking the politics of

everyday life seriously as teachers, students, administrators, and members of hegemonic academic

cultures. Culture itself is thus redefined to incorporate individual and collective memories, dreams, andhistory that are contested and transformed through the political

Oppression is not a binary force only by examining our relationship to others can we

participate in liberatory political projects


15/26

Henze, Professor of English, 2000*Brent, Who Says Who Says? Reclaiming Identity: ReclaimingIdentity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, Ed. Paula Moya & Michael Hames-

Garcia]

One outcome of these approaches to participating in the politics of the oppressed is that our way of

thinking about oppression must be modified. Rather than treat oppression as a binary force either

oppressive or unoppressive to ourselves (and, if unoppressive, also unrelated to ourselves), we mustsee it as complex and relational, linking us to others and at the same time making us responsible for

how we participate in the matrices of power that sustain oppression. The result of seeing oppression

in this way is to enable more effective participation in these systems; by broadening our ways of

knowing about the systems within which we operate, we at least potentially increase our ability to

shape these systems in the long term. It enables us to participate in liberatory political projects more

effectively, working in concert with rather than against or in place of those whose experiences of

oppression both necessitate and ground this work.

White people must also articulate their experiences of race issues this is the only

way that they can unlearn their positions of privilege

Schraub, 2007*David, A Clarification of Standpoint Theory,http://dsadevil.blogspot.com/2007_05_06_archive.html ]

When it comes to race issues, White voices do have unique and valuable contributions to add to the

discourse. Many of them, I suspect, are also structurally suppressed, in that they haven't come out

because they don't make sense within a knowledge paradigm that says the White perspective is the

universal perspective. Conditioned to believe that their experiences are universal, Whites haven't

developed the language to talk about their experience as particularized events, and (speaking as a

White) this cripples attempts to genuinely engage in racial dialogue in a very frustrating manner. But

that doesn't mean that if such language came to be, the revealed thoughts might not provide clues at

achieving a progressive racial vision. Hence, I support efforts to articulate White perspectives on racial

issues, too, and I think these perspectives have independent value. This is so for two reason.

Ideologically, I'm uncomfortable with exiling any voice from the polity, even under the mantra ofinverting hierarchies. There are plenty of democratic problems with such a move, and I have a strong

pluralist commitment towards exposing and airing as many voices as possible. I don't think this has to be

zero-sum. But also, from a pragmatic angle, I think that the progressive anti-racist community could

score significant gains in the White community by affirming that, yes, their voice and their stories are

valuable, and we want to hear them. As Kenji Yoshino has written, viewing majority members "only as

impediments, as people who prevent others from expressing themselves" is a major factor in these

people "respond[ing] to civil rights advocates with hostility." I don't actually think that the community is

opposed to such a move, but the issue is rarely pressed and without it all this talk of "epistimological

advantage" is understandably frightening to people who don't have a clue what this "post-modernism"

thing is. As feminist and race theorists smarter than me have talked about, there is very little more

frustrating than being stifled by linguistic inadequacy. White people, being part of our racial ecology,have stories to tell, and not only do they have no words by which to speak them, they aren't even

sure they're supposed to be allowed to contribute. No wonder they default back to universalist

paradigms which articulate (but do not replicate) a vision of reality that is familiar and comfortable to

them. Breaking out of that paradigm necessitates a clear statements from standpoint theorists that

we are interested in all standpoints, and that to the extent we are more interested in those of the

minority, its a case of distributions rather than exclusion.


16/26


17/26

Personal Experience Good

Failure to examine ones own speaking position replicates structures of privilege and

oppression

Campbell, 1997 [Fiona,members.tripod.com/FionaCampbell/speech_acts_on_problematising_empowerment.htm, 12-04-07]

So who am I - to speak, to be listened to? And why is it important to identify my speaking position? The

word in spoken or written form (sometimes referred to as Discourse), is the site that both power and

knowledge meet. Which is why speech acts can be inherently dangerous. Furthermore, a person in a

privileged speaking position, such as myself, has a political/ethical responsibility to interrogate his/her

relationship to subordinated and disadvantaged peoples and declare their interest. On this point, La

Trobe University, Professor Margaret Thornton states assumed objectivity of knowledge itself

camouflage not only the fact that it always has a standpoint, but that it also serves an ideological

purpose (Thornton 1989: 125). Refusing to declare ones speaking position, I argue constitutes not

only a flagrant denial of the privileging effect of speech, but must be considered as an act ofcomplicity to systematically mislead. I speak tonight from what I would term, a privileged speaking

position. As someone who has been exposed to tertiary education, had an opportunity to read and

reflect on many books and ideas, with a job and more particularly, as a teacher. Indeed, for some I act as

a mentor - the one who knows something about knowledge. On the other hand, I am deeply

ambivalent about my expertise to engage in the act of public speech talk. For am from the margins, the

client, patient, the riff raff, flotsam and jetsam of society and might say - somewhat deviant. It is

important to come clean about my speaking position, my knowledge standpoint and declare my

interests: I speak for myself as a woman who has experienced youth homelessness, childhood violence

and later disability. Before I speak I am required to undertake a process of self-examination, to

scrutinise my representational politics, to immerse myself in a self-reflexive interrogation and discern

what [my] representational politics authorises and who it erases (Howe 1994: 217). Do I speak formyself or others? Am I making gross generalisations about groups in the community? Does my speech

contain unacknowledged assumptions and values? More specifically, within this process of reflection, I

am required to examine the context and location from which I speak, in order to ascertain whether it is

allied with structures of oppression *or+ allied with resistance to oppression ( Alcoff: 1991: 15).

The social location of the speaker significantly affects the epistemological grounding

of their arguments

Alcoff 92[Linda, Prof of Philosophy, The Problem of Speaking for Others, Cultural Critique 20, p.6-7]

First, there is a growing recognition that where one speaks from affects the meaning and truth of what

one says, and thus that one cannot assume an ability to transcend one's location. In other words, aspeaker's location (which I take here to refer to their social location, or social identity) has an

epistemically significant impact on that speaker's claims and can serve either to authorize or

disauthorize one's speech. The creation of women's studies and African-American studies departments

was founded on this very belief: that both the study of and the advocacy for the oppressed must come

to be done principally by the oppressed themselves, and that we must finally acknowledge that

systematic divergences in social location between speakers and those spoken for will have a


18/26

significant effect on the content of what is said. The unspoken premise here is simply that a speaker's

location is epistemically salient. I shall explore this issue further in the next section.

Ones social location is a significant determinant of the way that one understands and

represents the world

Alcoff, 1992 [Linda, The Problem of Speaking for Others, Cultural Critique, 5-32.]First, there is a growing recognition that where one speaks from affects the meaning and truth of what

one says, and thus that one cannot assume an ability to transcend one's location. In other words, a

speaker's location (which I take here to refer to their social location, or social identity) has an

epistemically significant impact on that speaker's claims and can serve either to authorize or

disauthorize one's speech. The creation of women's studies and African-American studies departments

was founded on this very belief: that both the study of and the advocacy for the oppressed must come

to be done principally by the oppressed themselves, and that we must finally acknowledge that

systematic divergences in social location between speakers and those spoken for will have a

significant effect on the content of what is said. The unspoken premise here is simply that a speaker's

location is epistemically salient. I shall explore this issue further in the next section.

The social location of speakers and listeners determines the meaning of what is said

Alcoff, 1992*Linda, The Problem of Speaking for Others, Cultural Critique, 5-32.]Rituals of speaking are constitutive of meaning, the meaning of the words spoken as well as the

meaning of the event. This claim requires us to shift the ontology of meaning from its location in a text

or utterance to a larger space, a space that includes the text or utterance but that also includes the

discursive context. And an important implication of this claim is that meaning must be understood as

plural and shifting, since a single text can engender diverse meanings given diverse contexts. Not only

what is emphasized, noticed, and how it is understood will be affected by the location of both speaker

and hearer, but the truth-value or epistemic status will also be affected. For example, in many

situations when a woman speaks the presumption is against her; when a man speaks he is usually takenseriously (unless he talks "the dumb way," as Andy Warhol accused Bruce Springsteen of doing, or, in

other words, if he is from an oppressed group). When writers from oppressed races and nationalities

have insisted that all writing is political the claim has been dismissed as foolish, or grounded in

ressentiment, or it is simply ignored; when prestigious European philosophers say that all writing is

political it is taken up as a new and original "truth" (Judith Wilson calls this "the intellectual equivalent of

the 'cover record."')g The rituals of speaking that involve the location of speaker and listeners affect

whether a claim is taken as a true, well-reasoned, compelling argument, or a significant idea. Thus,

how what is said gets heard depends on who says it, and who says it will affect the style and language

in which it is stated, which will in turn affect its perceived significance (for specific hearers).

Examination of our social location requires more than a simple disclaimer this

alienates others and reinforces the speakers position of privilege

Alcoff, 1992*Linda, The Problem of Speaking for Others, Cultural Critique, 5-32.]We must also interrogate the bearing of our location and context on what it is we are saying, and this

should be an explicit part of every serious discursive practice we engage in. Constructing hypotheses

about the possible connections between our location and our words is one way to begin. This


19/26

procedure would be most successful if engaged in collectively with others, by which aspects of our

location less highlighted in our own minds might be revealed to us. l3 One deformed way in which this

is too often carried out is when speakers offer up in the spirit of "honesty" autobiographical

information about themselves usually at the beginning of their discourse as a kind of disclaimer. This

is meant to acknowledge their own understanding that they are speaking from a specified, embodied

location without pretense to a transcendental truth. But as Maria Lugones and others have forcefully

argued, such an act serves no good end when it is used as a disclaimer against one's ignorance or

errors and is made without critical interrogation of the bearing of such an autobiography on what is

about to be said. It leaves for the listeners all the real work that needs to be done. For example, if a

middle-class white man were to begin a speech by sharing with us this autobiographical information

and then using it as a kind of apologetics for any limitations of his speech, this would leave those of us

in the audience who do not share his social location to do the work by ourselves of translating his

terms into our own, appraising the applicability of his analysis to our diverse situation, and determining

the substantive relevance of his location on his claims. This is simply what less-privileged persons have

always had to do when reading the history of philosophy, literature, etc., making the task of

appropriating these discourses more difficult and time-consuming (and more likely to result in

alienation). Simple unanalyzed disclaimers do not improve on this familiar situation and may even

make it worse to the extent that by offering such information the speaker may feel even moreauthorized to speak and be accorded more authority by his peers.


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Narratives Good

Narratives are an important means of understanding experience and struggle





Practicing Solidarity, Duke University Press p. 77]

This section focuses on life story-oriented written narratives, but this is clearly only one, albeit

important, context in which to examine the development of political consciousness. Writing is itself

an activity marked by class and ethnic position. However, testimonials, life stories, and oral histories

are a significant mode of remembering and recording experience and struggles. Written texts are not

produced in a vacuum. In fact, texts that document Third World women's life histories owe their

existence as much to the exigencies of the political and commercial marketplace as to the knowledge,skills, motivation, and location of individual writers.

Narratives are key loci for subversive practices and a basis for knowledge, redefining

political process and action





Practicing Solidarity, Duke University Press p. 78-80]Similarly, in the last two decades, numerous publishing houses in different countries have published

autobiographical or life story-oriented texts by Third World feminists. This is a testament to the role of

publishing houses and university and trade presses in the production, reception, and dissemination of

feminist work, as well as to the creation of a discursive space where (self-)knowledge is produced by and

for Third World women. Feminist analysis has always recognized the centrality of rewriting and

remembering history, a process that is significant not merely as a corrective to the gaps, erasures, and

misunderstandings of hegemonic masculinist history but because the very practice of remembering

and rewriting leads to the formation of politicized consciousness and self-identity. Writing often

becomes the context through which new political identities are forged. It becomes a space for struggle

and contestation about reality itself. If the everyday world is not transparent and its relations of rule-

its organizations and institutional frameworks-work to obscure and make invisible inherent

hierarchies of power (Smith 1987), it becomes imperative that we rethink, remember, and utilize our

lived relations as a basis of knowledge. Writing (discursive production) is one site for the production of

this knowledge and this consciousness. Written texts are also the basis of the exercise of power and

domination. This is clear in Barbara Harlow's (1989) delineation of the importance of literary production

(narratives of resistance) during the Palestinian intifada. Harlow argues that the Israeli state has

confiscated both the land and the childhood of Palestinians, since the word "child" has not been used

for twenty years in the official discourse of the Israeli state. This language of the state disallows the

notion of Palestinian "childhood, ~ thus exercising immense military and legal power over Palestinian


21/26

children. In this context, Palestinian narratives of childhood can be seen as narratives of resistance,

which write childhood, and thus selfhood, consciousness, and identity, back into daily life. Harlow's

analysis also indicates the significance of written or recorded history as the basis of the constitution of

memory. In the case of Palestinians, the destruction of all archival history, the confiscation of land, and

the rewriting of historical memory by the Israeli state mean not only that narratives of resistance must

undo hegemonic recorded history, but that they must also invent new forms of encoding resistance, of

remembering. Honor Ford Smith, 26 in her introduction to a book on life stories of Jamaican women,

encapsulates the significance of this writing: The tale-telling tradition contains what is most poetically

true about our struggles. The tales are one of the places where the most subversive elements of our

history can be safely lodged, for over the years the tale tellers convert fact into images which are

funny, vulgar, amazing or magically real. These tales encode what is overtly threatening to the

powerful into covert images of resistance so that they can live on in times when overt struggles are

impossible or build courage in moments when it is. To create such tales is a collective process

accomplished within a community bound by a particular historical purpose . . .. They suggest an

altering or re-defining of the parameters of political process and action. They bring to the surface

factors which would otherwise disappear or at least go very far underground. (Sistren with Ford-Smith

1987, 3-4) I quote Ford-Smith's remarks because they suggest a number of crucial elements of the

relation of writing, memory, consciousness, and political resistance; the codification of covert images ofresistance during non revolutionary times; the creation of a communal (feminist) political consciousness

through the practice of storytelling; and the redefinition of the very possibilities of political

consciousness and action through the act of writing. One of the most significant aspects of writing

against the grain in both the Palestinian and the Jamaican contexts is thus the invention of spaces,

texts, and images for encoding the history of resistance. Therefore, one of the most significant

challenges here is the question of decoding these subversive narratives. Thus,history and memory are

woven through numerous genres; fictional texts, oral history, and poetry, as well as testimonial

narratives-not just what counts as scholarly or academic ("real"?) historiography. An excellent example

of the recuperation and rewriting of this history of struggle is the 1970s genre of U,S, black women's

fiction that collectively rewrites and encodes the history of American slavery and the oppositional

agency of African American slave women. Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gayl Jones's Corregidora are twoexamples that come to mind.

Narratives are crucial to creating cross-cultural understandings without claiming to

completely know the experiences of others

Young, Professor of Political Science, 1996 [Iris Marion, Communication and the Other: BeyondDeliberative Democracy, Democracy and Difference, Ed. Seyla Benhabib]

In a communicative democracy participants in discussion aim at reaching understandings about

solutions to their collective problems. Although there is hardly a speaking situation in which participants

have no shared meanings, disagreements, divergent understandings, and varying perspectives are also

usually present. In situations of conflict that discussion aims to address, groups often begin withmisunderstandings or a sense of complete lack of understanding of who their interlocutors are, and a

sense that their own needs, desires, and motives are not understood. This is especially so where class or

culture separates the parties. Doing justice under such circumstances of differences requires

recognizing the particularity of individuals and groups as much as seeking general interests. Narrative

fosters understanding across such difference without making those who are different symmetrical, in

at least three ways. First, narrative reveals the particular experiences of those in social locations,

experiences that cannot be shared by those situated differently but that they must understand in


22/26

order to do justice to the others. Imagine that wheelchair-bound people at a university make claims

upon university resources to remove what they see as impediments to their full participation, and to

give them positive aid in ways they claim will equalize their ability to compete with able-bodied students

for academic status. A primary way they make their case will be through telling stories of their physical,

temporal, social, and emotional obstacles. It would be a mistake to say that once they hear these stories

the others understand the situation of the wheelchair-bound to the extent that they can adopt their

point of view. On the contrary, the storytelling provides enough understanding of the situation of the

wheelchair-bound by those who can walk for them to understand that they cannot share the

experience. Narrative exhibits subjective experience to other subjects. The narrative can evoke

sympathy while maintaining distance because the narrative also carries an inexhaustible latent shadow,

the transcendence of the Other, that there is always more to be told. Second, narrative reveals a

source of values, culture, and meaning. When an argument proceeds from premise to conclusion, it is

only as persuasive as the acceptance of its premises among deliberators. Few institutions bring people

together to face collective problems, moreover, where the people affected, however divided and

diverse, can share no premises. Pluralist polities, however, often face serious divergences in value

premises, cultural practices and meanings, and these disparities bring conflict, insensitivity, insult, and

misunderstanding. Under these circumstances, narrative can serve to explain to outsiders what

practices, places, or symbols mean to the people who hold them. Values, unlike norms, often cannotbe justified through argument. But neither are they arbitrary. Their basis often emerges from the

situated history of a people. Through narrative the outsiders may come to understand why the insiders

value what they value and why they have the priorities they have. How do the Lakota convey to others

in South Dakota why the Black Hills mean so much to them, and why they believe they have special

moral warrant o demand a stop to forestry in the Black Hills? Through storiesmyths in which the Black

Hills figure as primary characters, stories of Lakota individuals and groups in relation to those mountains

values appear as a result of a history by which a group relate where they are coming from. Finally,

narrative not only exhibits experience and values from the point of stew of the subjects that have and

hold them. It also reveals a total social knowledge from the point of view of that social position. Each

social perspective has an account not only of its own life and history but of every other position that

affects its experience. Thus listeners can learn about how their own position, actions, and valuesappear to others from the stories they tell. Narrative thus exhibits the situated knowledge available of

the collective from each perspective, and the combination of narratives from different perspectives

produces the collective social wisdom not available from any one position.

Narratives are key to relating experiences of injustice that otherwise cannot be shared

they are crucial to cross-cultural communication

Young,Professor of Political Science, 2000 [Iris Marion, Inclusion and Democracy, p.70-7]Another mode of expression, narrative, serves important functions in democratic communication, to

foster understanding among members of a polity with very different experience or assumptions about

what is important. In recent years a number of legal theorists have turned to narrative as a means ofgiving voice to kinds of experience which often go unheard in legal discussions and courtroom settings,

and as a means of challenging the idea that law expresses an impartial and neutral standpoint above all

particular perspectives. Some legal theorists discuss the way that storytelling in the legal context

functions to challenge a hegemonic view and express the particularity of experience to which the law

ought to respond but often does not. Several scholars of Latin American literature offer another variant

of a theory of the political function of storytelling, in their reflections on testimonio. Some resistance

movement leaders in Central and South America narrate their life stories as a means of exposing to the


23/26

wider literate world the oppression of their people and the repression they suffer from their

governments. Often such testimonios involve one persons story standing or speaking for that of a

whole group to a wider, sometimes global, public, and making claims upon that public for the group.

This raises important questions about how a particular persons story can speak for others, and whether

speaking to the literate First World public changes the construction of the story.22 While these are

important questions, here I wish only to indicate a debt to both of these literatures, and analyse these

insights with an account of some of the political functions of storytelling. Suppose we in a public want to

make arguments to justify proposals for how to solve our collective problems or resolve our conflicts

justly. In order to proceed, those of us engaged in meaningful political discussion and debate must share

many things. We must share a description of the problem, share an idiom in which to express alternative

proposals, share rules of evidence and prediction, and share some normative principles which can serve

as premisses in our arguments about what ought to be done. When all these conditions exist, then we

can engage in reasonable disagreement. Fortunately, in most political disputes these conditions are met

in some respect and to some degree, but for many political disputes they are not met in other respects

and degrees. When these conditions for meaningful argument do not obtain, does this mean that we

must or should resort to a mere power contest or to some other arbitrary decision procedure? I say not,

Where we lack shared understandings in crucial respects, sometimes forms of communication other

than argument can speak across our differences to promote understanding. I take the use of narrativein political communication to be one important such mode. Political narrative differs from other forms

of narrative by its intent and its audience context. I tell the story not primarily to entertain or reveal

myself, but to make a pointto demonstrate, describe, explain, or justify something to others in an

ongoing political discussion. Political narrative furthers discussion across difference in several ways.

Response to the differend. Chapter 1 discussed how a radical injustice can occur when those who

suffer a wrongful harm or oppression lack the terms to express a claim of injustice within the

prevailing normative discourse. Those who suffer this wrong are excluded from the polity, at least with

respect to that wrong. Lyotard calls this situation the differend. How can a group that suffers a particular

harm or oppression move from a situation of total silencing and exclusion with respect to this suffering

to its public expression? Storytelling is often an important bridge in such cases between the mute

experience of being wronged and political arguments about justice. Those who experience the wrong,and perhaps some others who sense it, may have no language for expressing the suffering as an

injustice, but nevertheless they can tell stories that relate a sense of wrong. As people tell such stories

publicly within and between groups, discursive reflection on them then develops a normative

language that names their injustice and can give a general account of why this kind of suffering

constitutes an injustice. A process something like this occurred in the United States and elsewhere in

the 1970s and 1980s, as injustice we now call sexual harassment gradually came into public discussion.

Women had long experienced the stress, fear, pain, and humiliation in their workplace that courts today

name as a specific harm. Before the language and theory of sexual harassment was invented, however,

women usually suffered in silence, without a language or forum in which to make a reasonable

complaint. As a result of women telling stories to each other and to wider publics about their treatment

by men on the job and the consequences of this treatment, however, a problem that had no name was

gradually identified and named, and a social moral and legal theory about the problem developed.

Facilitation of local publics and articulation of collective affinities. Political communication in mass

democratic societies hardly ever consists in all the people affected by an issue assembling together in a

single forum to discuss it. Instead, political debate is widely dispersed in space and time, and takes place

within and between many smaller publics. By a local public I mean a collective of persons allied within

the wider polity with respect to particular interests, opinions, and/or social positions.23 Storytelling is

often an important means by which members of such collectives identify one another, and identify the

basis of their affinity. The narrative exchanges give reflective, voice to situated experiences and help


24/26

affinity groupings give an account of their own individual identities in relation to their social

positioning and their affinities with others.24 Once in formation, people in local publics often use

narrative as means of politicizing their situation, by reflecting on the extent to which they experience

similar problems and what political remedy for them they might propose. Examples of such local

publics emerging from reflective stories include the processes of consciousness-raising in which some

people in the womens movement engaged, and which brought out problems of battering or sexual

harassment where these were not yet recognized as problems. Understanding the experience of others

and countering preunderstandings. Storytelling is often the only vehicle for understanding the

particular experiences of those in particular social situations, experiences not shared by those

situated differently, but which they must understand in order to do justice.25

Narratives are necessary to correct for stereotypes and misconceptions about other

groups

Young, Professor of Political Science,2000 [Iris Marion, Inclusion and Democracy, p.70-7]While it sometimes happens that people know they are ignorant about the lives of others in the polity,

perhaps more often people come to a situation of political discussion with a stock of empty

generalities, false assumptions, or incomplete and biased pictures of the needs, aspirations, and

histories of others with whom or about whom they communicate. Such pre-understandings often

depend on stereotypes or overly narrow focus on a particular aspect of the lives of the people

represented in them. People with disabilities, to continue the example, too often must respond to

assumptions of others that their lives are joyless, that they have truncated capabilities to achieve

excellence, or have little social and no sex lives. Narratives often help target and correct such pre-

understandings. Revealing the source of values, priorities, or cultural meanings. For an argument to

get off the ground, its auditors must accept its premises. Pluralist polities, however, often face serious

divergences in value premises, cultural practices, and meanings, and these disparities bring conflict,

insensitivity, insult, and misunderstanding. Lacking shared premises, communicatively democratic

discussion, cannot proceed through reasoned argument under these circumstances, Under such

circumstances, narrative canserve to explain to outsiders what practices, places, or symbols mean tothe people who hold them and why they are valuable. Values, unlike norms, often cannot be justified

through argument. But neither are they arbitrary. Their basis often emerges from the situated narrative

of persons or groups, Through narrative the outsiders may come to understand why the insiders value

what they value and why they have the priorities they have.

Narratives that speak of privilege must refer to the materiality of situation, thus,

reanchoring positions to speak from


well as a Master's degree and a bachelor's degree from the University of Delhi in India. Originally aprofessor of women's studies at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, she is currently the women's



It is this insistence that distinguishes the work of a Reagon or a Pratt from the more abstract critiques of

"feminism" and the charges of totalization that come from the ranks of anti humanist intellectuals. For

without denying the importance of their vigilante attacks on humanist beliefs in man" and Absolute

Knowledge wherever they appear, it is equally important to point out the political limitations of an


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insistence on indeterminacy" that implicitly, when not explicitly, denies the critic's own situatedness in

the social, and in effect refuses to acknowledge the critic's own institutional home. Pratt, on the

contrary, succeeds in carefully raking apart the bases of her own privilege by resituating herself again

and again in the social, by constantly referring to the materiality of the situation in which she finds

herself. The form of the personal historical narrative forces her to reanchor herself repeatedly in each

of the positions from which she speaks, even as she works to expose the illusory coherence of those

positions. For the subject of such a narrative, it is not possible to speak from, or on behalf of, an

abstract indeterminacy. Certainly, Pratt's essay would be considered a conventional " (and therefore

suspect) narrative from the point of view of contemporary deconstructive methodologies, because of its

collapsing of author and text, its unreflected authorial intentionality, and its claims to personal and

political authenticity. Basic to the (at least implicit) disavowal of conventionally realist and

autobiographical narrative by deconstructionist critics is the assumption that difference can emerge only

through self-referential language, that is, through certain relatively specific formal operations present in

the text or performed upon it. Our reading of Pratt's narrative contends that a so-called conventional

narrative such as Pratt's is not only useful but essential in addressing the politically and theoretically

urgent questions surrounding identity politics. Just as Pratt refuses the methodological imperative to

distinguish between herself as actual biographical referent and her narrator, we have at points

allowed ourselves to let our reading of the text speak for us.

praxis of day-to-day living.

In order to heed the perspectives of others, we must critically examine the relation of

our own experiences to theirs we can never know the experience of another, but

through self-examination we might be able to form a common ground for relating to

them**GENDER NEUTRAL

Henze, Professor of English, 2000*Brent, Who Says Who Says? Reclaiming Identity: ReclaimingIdentity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, Ed. Paula Moya & Michael Hames-

Garcia]

But the idea that we must reconceive our experience relationally, and that this reconception bears on

the perspectives of both outsiders and members of oppressed groups, suggests the form that productive

alliances between these groups might take. Outsiders wishing to support the liberatory work of the

oppressed must form responsible and imaginative alliancesalliances grounded in appropriate

reconceptions of their experiences in relation to others. That is, we should not work toward imaginary

identifications of ourselves with others, in which we make claims about our sameness without

regard for the real differences in our experiences and lives; rather, we should work toward

imaginative identifications of ourselves with others, in which we interrogate our own experience,

seeking points where common ground or empathy might be actively constructed between us while

remaining conscious of the real differences between our experiences and lives. I call this type of

identification imaginative because it calls for us to imagine how our experiences might be analogousto rather than equivalent to the experiences of others. Moraga suggests a similar process when she

describes what is required for a gay male friend to create an authentic alliancewith her: He[they]

must deal with the primary source ofhis [their] own sense of oppression. He[they] must, first,

emotionally come to terms with what it feels like to be a victim. Ifhe [they]or anyonewere to

truly do this, it would be impossible to discount the oppression of others, except by again forgetting

how we have been hurt (Moraga 30). Before he [they] can support her [their] cause, he [they] must

empathize with her [them] by coming to terms with his [their] own experiences of oppression. This


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empathy will not provide him [them] with the actual experiences ofher [their] oppression, but it will

give them a basis for relating their experiences. This approach to forming responsible alliances with

others resembles the process of identifying experience as relevantly similar in order for members of a

group to produce useful frameworks for understanding oppression collective (as I discussed above). But

in forming alliances between an oppressed group and outsiders, experiences themselves cannot be

related; rather, the oppressive effects of the experience become the basis for common ground.

Moragas gay male friend cannot share her specific experiences of being a woman of color, but he may

share an experience of certain effects of this oppression to the extent that the oppression of gay men

and the oppression of women of color produce relevantly similar effects. By investigating his

experience of these effects, he can better understand her experience without ever needing to claim

that he has shared it.

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