Still Dangerous: Women and Public Speaking

Abstract

This paper brings into focus the female body—against the backdrop of cultural objectification—as it relates to negotiations of voice. Systemic barriers to power, including the threat of physical violence, aggression, and hostility towards non-conforming bodies, coupled with the intergenerational transmission of gender inequality conspire in the silencing of women. Therapeutic interventions are needed that recognize real impediments to speaking up and affirm women’s attempts, however untidy and disruptive, to own their bodies, desires, anger, and influence.

Keywords:

• objectification
• voice
• subjectivity
• body shame
• gender inequality
• size acceptance

Notes

¹ “Still Dangerous” was stamped by the FBI during McCarthyism on the files of suspected communists, such as Annette Rubenstein of the Brecht Forum, who was the subject of Dr. Christina L. Baker’s oral history project. I had the pleasure of hearing Annette tell her story of troubling the social order over hundreds of taped hours in conversation with my mother.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Catherine Baker-Pitts

Catherine Baker-Pitts, PhD, LCSW, is Co-Director of the postgraduate training program Minding the Body: Disruptions and Possibilities for Eating, Sex, Surgery, Subversion and Creativity at The Women’s Therapy Centre Institute in NYC. She is a graduate of numerous psychoanalytic programs and currently a candidate at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Her research and clinical work affirm nonconforming bodies and pluralistic gendered identities.