Intimate Silences and Inequality: Noticing the Unsaid through Triangulation

Murray, Amy; Lambert, Nicole

doi:10.1017/9781108345552.006

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…The contradiction between these exclusionary working conditions and employers' attempts to teach employees to be “team members” and “family” is perhaps most stark in domestic labor. Research among domestic workers by Shireen Ally () and Amy Jo Murray (Murray and Lambert ) found that black South African domestic workers were denied personhood and distanced by silence from their employers. White families commonly refer to black domestic workers as “part of the family,” and yet their work arrangements often distance domestic workers not only from employers' lives but also from their own children, who are left raised by others.…”

Section: From the Perspective Of Laborersmentioning

confidence: 99%

People refusing to be wealth: What happens when South African workers are denied access to “belonging in”

Jeske

2020

Economic Anthropology

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Research on wealth-in-people has proven useful for studying relationships between employers and employees in capitalist systems, but scholars have largely ignored an idea introduced alongside the concept of wealth-in-people in Igor Kopytoff and Suzanne Miers's foundational 1977 study. Namely, these authors describe a continuum of ways in which people who are "wealth" to others become either included into or excluded from the groups benefiting from and controlling that wealth. In this article, I use that continuum to examine workplace relationships in South Africa that fall on the exclusion end of the continuum, where discrimination, lack of training and advancement opportunities, and bureaucratic distancing prevent workers from "belonging in" workplace power structures. Drawing on twelve months of fieldwork in low-wage workplaces and surrounding communities in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, I argue that many workers in such settings respond by withholding their loyalty from employers, thereby limiting the extent to which they will "belong to" employers as wealth-in-people. This article sheds light on a popular discourse in South Africa and elsewhere that has criticized low-waged and unemployed workers for refusing to be model workers. Such workers follow a logic of refusing to "belong to" when they are denied opportunities to "belong in," thereby heightening one form of estrangement while potentially resisting another.

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Section: From the Perspective Of Laborersmentioning

confidence: 99%

People refusing to be wealth: What happens when South African workers are denied access to “belonging in”

Jeske

2020

Economic Anthropology

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“…Domestic labour is an uncomfortable relationship to participate in. The asymmetrical nature of the relationship is often displayed through unspoken boundaries, rules and resistance related to space (Dickey, 2000; Murray and Lambert, 2019), food (Archer, 2011) and in cases of possible confrontation and its avoidance (Marais and Van Wyk, 2015; Murray and Durrheim, 2019b). So much of this relationship is navigated in the realms of the ambiguous, the unspoken, the implied, the invisible and the silent (Archer, 2011; Murray and Durrheim, 2019b).…”

Section: The Case Of the Status Quo In Paid Domestic Labourmentioning

confidence: 99%

Maintaining the Status Quo through Repressed Silences: The Case of Paid Domestic Labour in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Murray

Durrheim

2020

Sociology

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As competent social actors, we individually and collectively leave things unsaid that might threaten to disrupt the status quo. In this article, we outline an understanding of the unsaid and extend its implications to include what we call ‘repressed silences’ or silences about which we do not speak. Drawing on a diary-interview study involving five domestic labour dyads comprised of a white employer and a black worker, we examine silences topicalised by participants, how the unsaid stands in contrast to what could/should have been said and finally how these silences constitute a form of repressed silences. We demonstrate how the topic of paid domestic labour and its labour-related roles, rights and responsibilities are silenced – and the silence itself is not spoken of – among participants, thereby (re)producing the status quo of South Africa’s (racialised) inequalities and hierarchies.

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Transforming the Unsaid into Action in Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982

Bae

2024

University of Toronto Quarterly

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It is often the act of listening that can transform silence into speech. Nam Joo Cho’s 2016 novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 sparked a feminist movement in South Korea. Instead of creating a character who is clearly articulating a feminist cause, Cho finds ways to speak of gendered injustices by using alternative modes of communications such as silence, howls, psychotic breaks, and footnotes. Jiyoung’s omission of speech externalizes what is thought and felt by many Korean women but left unsaid. The novel ultimately asks readers to hear the unsaid, react to Jiyoung’s experienced injustices, and turn what Jiyoung struggled to articulate into a collective act of solidarity, collective voice, and feminist action.

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Intimate Silences and Inequality: Noticing the Unsaid through Triangulation

Cited by 3 publications

References 52 publications

People refusing to be wealth: What happens when South African workers are denied access to “belonging in”

People refusing to be wealth: What happens when South African workers are denied access to “belonging in”

Maintaining the Status Quo through Repressed Silences: The Case of Paid Domestic Labour in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Transforming the Unsaid into Action in Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982

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