(Re)considering Voice

Abstract

This article considers some of complexities around a feminist imperative of `voice'. It is a reflective dialogue that follows the possibilities and problematics encountered in a social inquiry aimed at creating space for the women who participated to `give voice' as a collective. Our explorations about the ways that these women, diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, come to experience their everyday worlds as they do, involved identifying the social processes and practices shaping their lived actualities. Speaking together and back to the discourses of biomedicine that work to position these women in fixed and universal ways was also central to our researching. That the woman's voice goes largely unheard when spoken from `madness' made such work more urgent. As our navigations of speaking together shows, however, this was not as straightforward as we had envisaged: because the circumstances that produce experiences of oppression are rarely simple, social change efforts to ameliorate inequities will necessarily need to be nuanced. This polyphonic discussion honours the respective contributions to our knowledge-making endeavours, and tells of a project cast in feminism's `with'.