ABSTRACT
This chapter takes further the issue of the unfinished social change (McRobbie, 2009; Segal, 2013) by focusing specifically on how repetition and recitation of the various legitimate causes of women’s continuing oppression, discrimination at work and unequal treatment in societies around the globe might be unhelpful in overcoming the very domination it is meant to denounce. We suggest that this happens when the only way to speak about ourselves is through the language of domination, resulting in a grief that emerges from the accounts of how we become defeated. This then, we argue, obscures the potential for resistance and emergence of another speech that already exists. The chapter is devoted to describing how such processes occur and how they can be counteracted. That is, we show how we can bring about change by talking differently about ourselves. We do so by drawing on the data from our empirical work with women in academia conducted for a different purpose, some of which has been published elsewhere (Fotaki, 2009a, 2011, 2013).
