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Speech and gender: indian versions of the silence wager (at 1351)
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Speech is, and always has been, at the heart of folkloristic research, from the
traditional focus on ‘oral’ tradition to more recent sociological studies of speaking,
which attempt to understand how the social locations and social conditions
of speech affect what is said. As Pierre Bourdieu put it, the perspective has
shifted from an emphasis on speech as a realisation of linguistic competence to
the ‘socially conditioned way of realizing this natural capacity’ (1994:54). Not
everyone, Bourdieu observed in his critique of Austin’s performative theory
of speech, can utter the words ‘I name this ship the Royal Brittania’ or open
Parliament. There is no such thing as ‘pure’ speech, he remarked, no linguistic
free market. The power to speak, like speech itself, is socially conditioned, and
among the most influential social determinants of who is allowed to speak is
gender. Although Bourdieu has curiously little to say on gendered speech, and
even less on gendered silence, folklorists have shown a keen interest in these
topics and viewed silence not simply as the absence of speech but as a form
of social subordination.