Gender, innovation and ambiguity: speech prohibitions as a resource for ‘space to move’

Abstract

This article is based on the observation that in African women’s interactional practices, there is a space ‘between speech and silence’ (Gal, 1991), an ambiguous space between norm and sanction (Jaworski et al., 2005: 4), which allows for the negotiation of socially and culturally adequate gendered behaviour. As it is a space of negotiation, it is also one of social change. Notions of gender, ambiguity and risk, which are characteristic for this kind of space, are thus transferred also to social change, or in more general terms, innovation. I take two widely diverging examples from the Swahili (in eastern Africa) and Herero (in south-western Africa) societies to demonstrate this hypothesis, which aims at bringing together two threads of widely discussed topics: that of gender and social change (or development); and that of gender and language. Methodologically, this article is based on a micro-analysis and contextualized reconstruction of interactional practices, which provides a privileged path into understanding local processes of social change.