Gesturing Toward Peace: The Gesture of Women's Silence in Contemporary Anti-War Protest Movements

Ashley (Map'ung) Pryor

Black is the color that we wear;
Black, the color that speaks our anger.
Silence is the language that we speak;
Silence, a language that voices our anguish.

—From a brochure circulated at the Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing, 1995
(Cited in Sharkey and Casey)

"Don't Just Do Something, Stand There."

I propose to draw out the significance of the increasing use of silence by women in anti-war activism. I will draw from narrative accounts of two anti-war protest groups – the international movement Women in Black and the Buddhist Peace Fellowship – that use silence as the primary medium through which they "voice" protest against state-sanctioned injustice and violence in war. By reading these groups’ use of silence through the rhetorical category of the gesture, rather than as mere instances of political praxis or within a means-end formulation (poeisis), I hope to retrieve an important resource within the Western rhetorical tradition to rethink the relationship of the medium and mediality to the efficacy and ethics of political action. As their narratives reveal, these women have a complex relationship to silence in their protests. Many understand their silence as a response to and reworking of the historical silencing of women. They offer their silence as a kind of intensification and transformation of this historical silencing of women. Some understand their silence as modeling peace and others understand their use of silence as offering a means of protest that cannot be manipulated by mass media as easily as can words. Some find silence gives the most adequate expression to the grief and horror of war. Buddhist women experience silence as an integral part of their daily practice and cultivation of compassionate and enlightened understanding.

While the intention informing their relationship with silence differs, all of these accounts share an attention to silence as the medium and mediality in which political action takes place. Silence is central not only to the efficacy of communicating their anti-war message, but also grounds its ethical legitimacy. Feminist scholars have paid some attention to the use of silence in the Women in Black movement; my contribution will be to tie women’s use of silence in political protest to the rhetorical framework of the gesture and to the significance of silence as a medium of political agency.

The paper will draw both from previously conducted interviews with Women in Black (such as in Casey, Liddy, Rawlings and Sharkey) as well as narratives drawn from my experiences of engaging in silent protest with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. Women’s experiences of silence are complex and manifold, yet they seem to be rooted in an appreciation of how the medium of silence affects the message of anti-war protest. I will explore these multiple experiences with an eye to showing how they confirm ancient western rhetorical theories of the gesture. I will also perform some of the characteristics of silence and listening that the contemporary feminist rhetoriticians Glenn and Ratcliffe draw out in their works on these rhetorical arts.