writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

Furthermore, breaching the norms of public expression, women who speak question this exercise
of power, endangering a male domain, creating knowledge in resistance, not initiated by the “top”,
to a liberation movement now run by black male elites, claiming more “knowledge of dominant”, as
Isabelle Stengers may have defined it (Stengers, 2002).
This approach pushes the exercise of democracy into a corner by promoting de facto freedom of
expression and equality in expressions as two structuring components of a society to create. It
eliminates control (which barricades and legislates) and thus the domination (which uses it to hold),
to account for power (that of subalterns: those who do not speak out).
Economy of transmission
Then, far from wanting to complete the puzzle pieces of a national memory, such as in the case of
the Holocaust, or the one of survivors of the Rwandan genocide, the collection of women’s stories is
more about building an “economy of transmission” 9 within the meaning where it creates its specific
exchange currency – one language 10 , the stories themselves – and its own capital – the knowledge –
and therefore its own modes of wealth distribution, by pooling female collective memory, which is in
turn both black and African, as opposed to the “white Western male”, as outlined by Gilles Deleuze
(Deleuze, 1986).
It is more akin to an attitude of ownership/capitalization of a reality, of a situation taken from life,
real life, as opposed to institutional, rational life, as provided by State rhetoric. This ownership of the
“real” therefore requires methods not theorized that also form knowledge.
An alternative reading of globalization
This approach also runs counter to a global knowledge, which tend to “standardize” thought,
since it clings to each personal identities, borrowed heavily from local culture and socialization
(language, urban/rural, rich/poor...). By following in the footsteps of the foundations of
“ethnoscience” (Nathan, 2005), the process of collecting these memories does not try to adapt these
modes of expression to the dominant knowledge, but rather works to create its own values. As Jean‐
François Bayart invites us to “consider our time in its incompleteness and its fragility” (Bayart, 2004),
this process offers an alternative reading of globalization. For example, the aim is not to rewrite the
struggle against apartheid from female perspective, but rather to create a look of women who have
experienced apartheid, and thus having accumulated specific knowledge on a society in transition,
organized by those who collect.
A revealing intimate
Dealing only with violence, revealing their intimacy, their intimate relationships, these women
witnesses flout all social institutions and other local traditions, which designate sexuality as
masculine domain, and female sexuality as non‐existent, as being only at the service of the male.
Cutting short this trend, this revealed intimacy invents a form of social “legitimacy”, transgressing
traditional modes of communication, reserved and established by men throughout the community. It
establishes a new language that allows discussing, exchanging, developing and disseminating the
thought of equality with men. We can then speak of “revealing intimate.”
A moral of the invisible
Finally, “saying” in public her daily life as a woman, or some of its “elements”, pushing the
boundaries of what is invisible, hidden, latent, may propose a new grid of social reading, a “moral of
the invisible”, breaking all codes that now govern the South African society. As Michelle Perrot
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