Mutedness

Definition

Mutedness is the anthropological concept — originating with Edwin Ardener ("Belief and the Problem of Women," 1972) and disseminated through Shirley Ardener's edited volumes — that a group's relative silence or inaudibility is structural and positional rather than natural. Individuals belong to many pairs, groups or sets, "each of which may be thought of as occupying its own 'space,' or as sharing a particular 'universe'": "Members of one group may be 'dominant' relative to members of another group in one 'universe,' while in turn being 'muted' in relation to members of a third group sharing with them a universe differently defined." Examples from Ardener's chapter: "A woman may be 'muted' relative to her husband and 'dominant' in relation to her children; gypsy men are 'dominant' in their own culture and structurally 'muted' vis-à-vis the English." The concept also names who generates social concepts "and the words that label them" — muting is an asymmetry of expression, later taken up by Dale Spender (Man Made Language). Crucially, muting can hide itself: in the ordering monks ← lay-men ← nuns ← lay-women, "the (religious) precedence of nuns over lay-women may tend to obscure the priority of males between the sexes" — which "may account for the inability of some to distinguish asymmetries, that even bear upon them disadvantageously."

Key Thinkers

• Edwin Ardener — the concept's originator ("Belief and the Problem of Women," 1972; "The Problem Revisited," 1975); muting as the generation of concepts and labels; not yet paged (see log).
• Shirley Ardener — edited and applied the concept across Perceiving Women (1975), Defining Females (1978) and Women and Space (1993); the multi-universe formulation.
• Emma Ferry — the concept's design-historical application (2003/2006): "Clearly the Garretts have appropriated the dominant discourse of Eastlake, but by reading between the lines it is possible to discern the muted discourse" (p. 111) — muting used as a reading instrument for a design text, the Ardenerian apparatus carried into the history of decoration.
• Dale Spender — Man Made Language (1980), the take-up of muting in language theory; noted in Ardener's note 10; not yet paged (see log).
• Juliet Okely — the gypsy case ("dominant" in their own culture, structurally muted vis-à-vis the English) and the boarding-school study; not yet paged (see log).

Related Concepts

• Gendered Space — the spatial distribution of muting: who may occupy, cross, or be confined.
• Partition of Space — the ordering system within which dominance and muting are positional.
• Separate Spheres — the historical regime in which the domestic sphere muted women's public expression.
• Power — muting as power's quietest operation: asymmetry concealed even from its subjects.
• Das Man — the everyday "they" whose idiom everyone speaks; a phenomenological cousin of the question of who names the world.
• Gender and the Interior — the interior-design uptake: the historical identification of women with the interior as a discourse of power.
• Advice Literature — the genre where muting is textual: Ferry's demonstration that a decoration handbook carries a dominant discourse (Eastlake's) on its surface and a muted discourse between its lines — muting as a property of the interior's own archive.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Partition of Space (Ardener 2006) — the multi-universe definition and examples (p. 17); the nuns/lay-women ordering and the obscuring of asymmetry (pp. 17–18); the concept's genealogy in note 10 (pp. 20–21).
• 'Decorators May be Compared to Doctors' (Ferry 2003/2006) — the concept's first application to a design-historical text: "Clearly the Garretts have appropriated the dominant discourse of Eastlake, but by reading between the lines it is possible to discern the muted discourse. Throughout, the reader of House Decoration, the aspiring purchaser of the services of a decorator or upholsterer is referred to as 'he' – a 'he' just as likely to be seduced by fashion as a 'she'" (p. 111). The datum is double: the women authors write through the dominant male address (muting operating at the level of the text's addressee, not its author), and the muted message is an inversion — Eastlake's flustered female consumer replaced by the resistant Paterfamilias, the seducible 'she' replaced by an equally seducible 'he' — so the muted discourse carries the book's gender-critique. Mutings can also be self-imposed by the muted: the Garretts' impatience with the "less politicised 'daughters of England'" (p. 114) shows professional women distancing themselves from the muted position they might otherwise speak for. See gender-and-the-interior, advice-literature.
• Towards a Feminist Poetics: Infection in the Sentence (Gilbert & Gubar 1979/2006) — muting as prescription: the most explicit prohibition of expression in the wiki's sources. Gilman's narrator, "forbidden her to touch pen to paper until she is well again" by her physician-husband — who "feels… that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies" — is muted by a medical regime: the muting is the "cure" (p. 123). The mechanism matches Edwin Ardener's asymmetry of expression exactly (who may generate concepts "and the words that label them"), but here enforced by diagnosis rather than custom: the woman's imagination itself is the thing not permitted a voice. And the counter-case is writing as de-muting: the story written anyway becomes the instrument that changes the prescriber's practice (Weir Mitchell "had changed his treatment of nervous prostration since reading" it) — the muted sentence, once written, infects the dominant discourse ("Infection in the sentence breeds"). See patriarchal-poetics, the-madwoman, gender-and-the-interior.
• source-notes/baudrillard-1975-the-mirror-of-production
• source-notes/stokes-rees-2018-symbiotic-spaces-museum-of-macau

Open Questions

• If muting is positional (one may be muted in one universe and dominant in another), can any group be described as simply 'silent' — and what follows for feminist histories of the interior that recover women's voices without asking which universe the recovery speaks from?
• Can muting be designed — do interiors (the dressing-room, the servants' corridor, the club's ante-room) materialise universes in which some occupants are structurally inaudible?
• Does the concept survive the queer-theoretical "destabilisation of implicit homogeneities" (Intimus, p. 11) — or does it presuppose the stable categories ('X' vs 'non-X') that destabilisation calls into question?
• Ferry's muted discourse is textual (the generic 'he' of an advice book) while Ardener's is social (who names the world). Can a muted discourse be recovered by reading alone — or does textual recovery risk mistaking the dominant discourse's own nervousness for the muted group's voice? And whose voice is the Garretts' 'he': a concession to the market, an appropriation of authority, or the last audible position in a male-dominated world? See advice-literature.