Epistemology Of Silence: A Critical Reading From Feminism And Ecology

Abstract

In the context of feminist epistemologies, theorists such as Avtar Brah, Donna Haraway and Silvia Rivera have developed epistemological critiques of knowledge based on the concept of experience. Thus, for example, Brah (2011) points out that this concept challenges the fixed categories of identity and difference, while Haraway (1995) emphasizes its relational and positioned character, thus positing forms of multispecies collaboration. Silence understood from the new feminist materialisms is defined as a virtual materiality or quasimatter, which prevents its identification with nothingness and absence. Based on the above, this article proposes to think the experience of silence as an experience of indeterminacy that tensions the intelligibility of situated knowledge. In this framework, the proposal problematizes the disposition to indeterminate knowledge and establishes the experience of silence as a key to study in order to expose its inherent opacity, as well as to question the established discursive certainties.