Abstract
Following tropes of light and dark in Amanda Gorman’s poem ‘The Hill We Climb’, the article explores, from a feminist perspective, who counts as a truth-teller. Against the backdrop of Hannah Arendt’s and Michel Foucault’s works on truth-telling, the article theorizes feminist modes of truth-telling. It scrutinizes truth-making in politics while unearthing the andro-centrism in truth-telling. Under the impression of post-truth rhetoric in recent populist landscapes, the article argues for a feminist and intersectional articulation of truth-telling to disclose the gendered and racialized power relations in contemporary masculinist populism.
When day comes we step out of the shade,
aflame and unafraid.
The new dawn blooms as we free it.
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.
Amanda Gorman, “The Hill We Climb”
Where everybody lies about everything of importance, the truth-teller, whether he knows it or not, has begun to act; he, too, has engaged himself in political business, for, in the unlikely event that he survives, he has made a start toward changing the world.”
Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics” (p. 307)
‘The Hill We Climb’ – an introduction
When Gorman (2021) – a ‘skinny Black girl […] descended from slaves’ raised by a single mother in Los Angeles – recited ‘The Hill We Climb’ during Joe Biden’s inauguration ceremony in January 2021, we witnessed a moment of truth-telling. When she entered the stage, a clear blue sky above her and the blazing sunlight of a clear winter’s day reflecting in her red hairband and yellow coat, the United States was a torn and divided country – and it still is. Affective economies of mistrust, anger and hate shape its emotional grammar, letting post-truth politics and alternative facts thrive. Those dark times seemed to vanish in the bright light shining on Biden’s inauguration. However, since then, police violence has not declined, and gendered and racialized murders are still on the rise: andro-centric politics and post-truth discourse roam political and media landscapes. As crises multiply, it has become clear that ‘post-truth’ cannot be understood as an era we enter and then exit at some point in history; it does not ‘emerg[e] out of thin air’ but forms as a ‘crystallization of a longer trajectory of devaluing truth in political discussion’ (Hyvönen 2018, 1). Gorman’s poem points precisely to post-truth history and its adjacent darkness. It shows how oppressed lives can ‘step out of the shade’, where power play has pushed them (Gorman 2021). In a brilliant feminist manoeuvre, Gorman declares the US’s fragility, vulnerability and heterogeneity to be its strengths, not its weaknesses. She steps out of the shade: breaking sexist rhetoric, fighting misogynistic tropes of ‘grab ‘em by the pussy’, and openly challenging the racist residues of slavery, thwarting politics’ masculinist repertoire of boldness.
This article explores, from a feminist perspective, who counts as truth-tellers against the backdrop of a dual problematization provided by Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. In theorizing feminist truth-telling and the problematization of truth-making in politics, I also unearth andro-centric tropes of truth-telling. A feminist and intersectional articulation of truth-telling discloses the gendered and racialized power relations in contemporary masculinist populism.
‘Quiet isn’t always peace’ – An archive for dark times
The archive of the history of political ideas is a powerful place. As a ‘system of enunciation’, it is ‘the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events’ (Foucault 1972, 129). Its power not only arranges but also suppresses knowledges. Still, deep in the archive’s shadows linger knowledges, narratives and (hi-)stories that challenge the archive’s power. The archive stores and prioritizes political thinking and – often (White) male – authors. At the same time, it works as an ‘arsenal’ that provides us with ideas, models, tools and arguments for a struggle against hegemonic knowledge production and meaning-making (Llanque 2008, 2). Archival powers can make knowledges disappear and determine what counts as knowledge. In the archive, knowledge production is connected to the production of power and truth (Foucault 1972). In the process of normalization, knowledge and truth become intertwined, almost to a degree of undecidability. In turn, normalization works the archive, deciding whose stories, lives and knowledges count.
A feminist critique of the archive, on the one hand, acknowledges that the ‘survival of the archive is part of a truth-telling infrastructure’ that only ‘hands down the perspectives of the masters not the enslaved’ (Honig 2021, 99). On the other hand, it troubles, challenges and subverts the archive, browsing through its segments and properly arranged files to expose it as a machinery of truth-making. In the archive, resistance lingers. Gorman tells us that ‘Quiet isn’t always peace’ and explores the possibilities of resistance within archival power structures that silence racialized, gendered and poor voices (Spivak 1988).
Arendt does not scrutinize the archive’s ‘profound erasure’ of othered populations. She defies the political quality of gendered experiences of inequality and oppression and feminist struggles, arguing that gender-specific claims are de-politicizing because they belong to the private sphere. Yet her works have inspired many feminist reiterations (e.g. Honig 1995). Foucault, in contrast, tasks himself with documenting the power machinery that leads to such an erasure. He does so with a ‘technique of depathologization’ (Honig 2021, 73, 77; cf. Spivak 1988, 75), dedicating his writings to the analysis of power/knowledge relations, the genealogical normalization of heteronormativity, and the criminalization of ‘deviant’ sexuality. However, Foucault cannot count as a feminist either. Despite his critical research on the normative production of sexuality, he does not problematize the gendered hierarchies embedded in parrhesia, which becomes most visible in his discussion of the ‘parrhesiastic role’ of Creusa in Euripides’s Ion (Foucault 1983, 13-21; Maxwell 2018; Tamboukou 2012, 853). 1 Still, both Arendt’s and Foucault’s masterly works provide analytical tools – an ‘arsenal’ – with which to deconstruct archival powers. They not only reproduce the gendered and racialized power asymmetries in their (now also archived) works but provide, at the same time, a thorough analysis of their inner workings (Allen 2002).
Since both Arendt and Foucault are analysts of the darkness within ‘the philosophy/truth/politics assemblage’ (Tamboukou 2012, 856), they emphasize how public opinion together with its discursive-narrative production is bound to power play and oppression. Following Eurocentric, enlightenment-oriented tropes of light and bright, Arendt connects them to freedom, politics and plurality. Foucault uses tropes of light and dark as well when he writes that the archive determines that not all knowledges ‘withdraw at the same pace in time, but shine, as it were, like stars, some that seem close to us shining brightly from afar off, while others that are close to us are already growing pale’ (Foucault 1972, 129). In contrast, an intersectional feminist critique of tropes of light and dark argues that not only do the ‘microphysics of power’ (Foucault 1978a, 28) rule in the shades, but that resistance can emerge from there as well where it has been hiding under the ‘protection’ of the archive’s erasure. 2
Gorman turns to the dichotomy of light and dark to refer to relations of oppression: we can ‘find light’ even in a ‘never-ending shade’ (Gorman 2021). With Arendt, we can wonder where the audacity and courage to step out of the shade come from? Gorman answers that something happens in the shades where we prepare and establish the preconditions to step out of them – a thought that can be found in Foucault when he summarizes: ‘Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’ (1978b, 95).
‘It’s the past we step into, and how to repair it’ – Arendt and Foucault on truth-telling
To discuss truth-telling, Arendt and Foucault turn their attention towards the past, in particular to ancient Greece and Socrates – that is, we could claim, to an old (White) man telling everyone what is best and lamenting that nobody seems to listen or even care. Socrates, however, represents someone who takes politics and truth-telling seriously. He seeks to educate his fellow (male!) citizens by asking critical questions; he wants to improve the polis’s conditions. Moreover, against ridicule and in the face of grave danger (Arendt 2005, 296), Socrates audaciously stands up for what he believes to be true. From a feminist perspective, Socratic scrutiny of power relations by speaking ‘the truth’ about the realities of oppression and inequality is crucial. Socrates is a figure representing both the bright light of the polis, where he asks his discomforting questions about a good life (for all?), and the darkness, where he vanishes into when he is imprisoned for ‘poisoning’ the youth with radical ideas. By threatening the polis’s proper order, Socrates asks about ‘the truth’, while he questions the assumption of a singular truth.
A contemporary theory of feminist truth-telling refers to the notion of ‘truth’ as post-foundational: it is a constructed outcome of a discourse of normalization that marks knowledges as true or untrue. This notion of truth is radically anti-essentialist. There is no such thing as one single truth or essence of knowledge that might be understood as THE truth. How problematic the demarcation of knowledge as truth becomes is described in ‘The Hill We Climb’, when Gorman writes that ‘the norms and notions, of that just is, isn’t always just-ice [sic]’. What we know to be just is a construction that does not necessarily entail a just truth. The relation between truth, politics, and the philosophical search for truth is more intertwined than Arendt’s (2005) works on truth-telling imply (Zerilli 2021), where she rigidly differentiates between politics (which has a complicated relationship with truth) and philosophy (the place of truth-seeking and truth-making par excellence).
The ambivalent and messy relation between truth-telling and normalized ‘truth’ renders truth-telling a dangerous act (Arendt 2005, 307). As we saw in the beginning: survival is unlikely for those who tell the truth. We find a similar thought in Foucault’s parrhesia – a speech act that can be translated as ‘frank speech’ (Zerilli 2020, 9). Parrhesia entails an action through which persons tell their truth against a regime of untruth – even when endangering their lives. It is a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life through danger, a certain type of relation to himself or other people through criticism (self-criticism or criticism of other people), and specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty. More precisely, parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself). In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy. (Foucault 1983, 5, my italics)
The andro-centric tropes that we find in Foucault’s definition are not explained in the usage of male pronouns alone but also reside in the style of parrhesia: it is frank and dangerous. Those speaking the truth ‘properly’ risk their lives out of a sense of duty – a gendered trope that we find in patriotic narratives that connect masculinity with the fight for freedom and selfless sacrifice.
Moreover, there is a paternalist trope in parrhesia. When Foucault writes that truth-tellers seek to improve or help other people, it implies an agency lacking in othered populations, and thus a form of infantilization or victimization. In today’s patriarchal societies, there is a ‘hierarchy of truth in which some people (usually White, heterosexual, cisgender men) are assumed to be truthful, and others (usually women, people of color, and queer/non-gender-conforming individuals) are not’ (Maxwell 2018, 23). Since these othered populations cannot speak the truth, they need guidance and help from (White, bourgeois) men (Spivak 1988).
At first glance, Foucault and Arendt outline truth-telling as a speech activity linked to a sociopolitical situation where the speaker of truth and the addressee of truth take different positions within a social hierarchy. Parrhesia comes from ‘below’ and is directed towards ‘above’ (Foucault 1983, 5). In this scenario, parrhesia becomes a political activity of critique. Suppose we dig a little deeper and ask about the gendered and racialized hierarchies within regimes of (un)truth. Foucault has only little to offer because his concept of parrhesia denotes someone ‘who can negotiate the tension between power and powerlessness, public and private’ (Maxwell 2018, 24). Parrhesia ‘favors those who appear to have the freedom to move in and out of politics as they please – usually White, cisgender, affluent, heterosexual men – and that is sustained by (sometimes violent) silencing or delegitimizing of those who reveal the imbrications of truth-telling and hierarchy’ (Maxwell 2018, 24). Maxwell scrutinizes Foucault’s ‘gendered reading of truth-telling […] not only because it leads him to offer a typical masculine understanding’ of it, but also because it ‘leads him to miss an alternative way to understand the predicament of truth-telling’ – not the question of how to ‘use power while retaining a distance from power, but rather […] how to constitute power out of a position of powerlessness’ (Maxwell 2018, 24). With Gorman and Spivak: a shady position.
‘If only we dare’ – Unearthing masculinity in (populist) truth-telling
Binaries drive Arendt’s work. Foucault, by contrast, often blurs binaries. Yet, he remains blind to the gendered binaries in his account of truth-telling (Tamboukou 2012, 850). Asking ‘who counts as proper truth-teller’ (Maxwell 2018, 23; cf. Zerilli 2020, 15) implies disclosing gender binaries inherent in the notion of truth-telling; to answer this political question, gender matters. In what follows, I scrutinize four (gendered) binaries found in truth-telling to show how they rely upon contemporary post-truth discourse and populism: private versus public, philosophy versus politics, factual truths versus opinion, and factual truths versus common sense.
Plurality and the deconstruction of organized lying
Arendt (2005, 295) is convinced that ‘[n]o one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other […]’. Even though ‘truthfulness’ cannot be found ‘among the political virtues’ (Arendt 2005, 295), Arendt is ‘concerned with the question of when and how truth can matter for politics’ (Zerilli 2020, 6). However, she remains critical of the ‘assumption, inherited from the Western philosophical tradition, that truth simply does not matter for politics’ (Zerilli 2020, 6). To Arendt truth/fulness becomes political, when people task themselves with confronting a ‘community [that] has embarked upon organized lying’ (2005, 307, my italics). When lying becomes normalized and manipulates the plurality of the political, someone stepping out of the shade and telling the truth is the only remedy. In concentrating on the moment of entering the realm of the political, Arendt neglects both the politics of the private and the different conditions of entry. She does not ask who has the power to step out of the shade or who counts as a truth-teller. In this section, I will address the relation between politics and lying and problematize the reproduction of the private/public divide in Arendt’s account of truth-telling.
As with Foucault, Arendt emphasizes that power is nothing people possess. Instead, it is produced. Unlike Foucault, for Arendt power emanates from ‘acting in concert’ (1998, 192; Allen 2002). It is not a microphysical force but the outcome of people stepping out of the shade into the bright light of the public. Political power takes shape in the ‘in-between’ (Arendt 1998, 52); it brings people together. 3 Truth-telling thus ‘always depend[s] on the ability and willingness of citizens to listen and hear the truth that is told’ (Zerilli 2020, 15). Arendt acknowledges this, yet she misses that those without any position in the production of power – the ‘subaltern’ (Spivak 1988, 78f., 103) – cannot speak at all and thus remain unheard (even when screaming right into the masters’ faces).
Foucault, too, neglects that the way that, in a regime of organized lying, places exist where othered populations cannot insert themselves into the ‘parrhesiastic game’ (1983, 3ff.). A feminist reiteration of truth-telling needs to take the power of exclusion more seriously. It emphasizes that parrhesia ‘is not just about having the courage to tell the truth but also to listen to it carefully’ (Tamboukou 2012, 861). Stepping out of the shade, if it is possible at all, is a shared effort and a difficult one when truth-tellers are confronted with ‘the fact that the truth is disputed, contested, and sometimes dismissed in public’ (Maxwell 2018, 23). Would Gorman as a ‘skinny Black girl’ have been heard if she wasn’t already an acclaimed and promising young writer, if she wasn’t already part of the parrhesiastic game? Did we ever hear her mother speak while she raised Gorman as a single parent somewhere in L.A.? The ability to be heard depends on gendered and racialized identities that position you within the game of parrhesia – or outside of it.
Furthermore, we might ask whether resistance is not only realized as we step out of the shade but already practiced beforehand? There is resistance within the shades, plurality within the darkness, and undoubtedly different versions of ‘we’ in the dimly lit corners that qualify as political. Not making it to the light does not devalue the politics of resistance within the shade. It is an andro-centric understanding that politics (of resistance) only appear in the light of the public, not within the dark corners of the ‘household’. The traditional, almost sacrosanct, patriarchal separation of the public as a political realm and the private as a sphere of ‘mere’ reproduction cannot be upheld from a feminist position. Gorman tells us about her single mother, and she emphasizes her ancestry from enslaved people. Black lives and PoC have been rendered unheard and unseen by a racist and ethno-sexist regime of organized lying over hundreds of years: even though ‘truth is being told (by some), […] many of us are not listening’ (Zerilli 2020, 16). From an intersectional feminist perspective, Arendt’s insistence on the public-private divide is notorious (Honig 1995). It renders her ignorant of the politics resting in the private sphere.
Moreover, Arendt (2005, 307) emphasizes that truthfulness is ‘unsupported by the distorting forces of political power and interest […]’. 4 In contrast, feminist truth-tellers are entangled in them – part of them, sometimes complicit with them but also fighting against their perpetuation. Feminist truth-telling is messy and beyond neat organization. It does not seek to be ‘polished’ or ‘pristine’ or form a ‘union that is perfect’, but a ‘union with purpose’ (Gorman 2021). That is why feminist truth-telling is deeply involved in the politics of the private sphere and brings its struggles to the light. It messes with patriarchy’s proper separation between a realm of politics and a sphere of ‘mere’ reproduction.
In complicating the relationship between the public and the private, feminist truth-telling provides hope for radical change starting, for instance, with disclosing ruinous modes of lying. In contrast to Arendt, the politics of feminist truth-telling do not necessarily refer to brightness and light. More often, they are dark and somber – often ‘killjoys’ (Ahmed 2017, 164): they linger in the shades, haunt the orderly archive, and break with masculinist imaginations of rational speech and deliberative reasoning. Feminist truth-telling is angry and upset. It often remains unheard under conditions of patriarchal normalization as it is perceived as cacophonous – mere noise – from ‘irrational’ women and queers. It still cracks open, even if only a little, patriarchy’s proper spatial order. From these cracks, change might arise. The manifold queer-feminist truths insert plurality into the singularizing regime of organized lying.
Philosophy and politics – Intertwined modes of truth-telling?
Because of their traits as plural, contingent, agonistic (Hyvönen 2018, 2f.) and unstable, as ‘simply unfinished’ (Gorman 2021), factual truths render their tellers precarious. Since factual truths lack transcendent origin, factual truth-tellers cannot refer to a higher authority, yet they carry an ‘unreasonable stubborness’ (Arendt 2005, 304). They resist manipulation but do not rely on common ground or a fixed foundation – things often deemed necessary for political stability. The instability of factual truths is thus considered dangerous to a political union.
In contemporary masculinist populism, 5 we witness a counterstrategy to the plurality of factual truth-telling. Its leading figures propagandize the existence of a single truth, an idea that is dangerous to the plurality that weaves the texture of the political realm. It negates the plurality of truths and substitutes it with the claim that there is only one truth – that of the ‘heartland’ and the ‘true people’. Populist semantics, narratives and tropes refer to essentialist notions of belonging. They connect politics to imaginations of blood, race and sex, intertwining them to a sanguine patriotism that rearranges politics towards a hetero-sexist and racist regime of organized lying. Populism is thus ‘hostile to the very condition of democratic politics, namely, plurality’ (Zerilli 2020, 6). As a reaction to the danger posed by the plurality of factual truths and their tellers, the latter are ridiculed by populist leaders and communities – especially in times of crisis, where stability, security and safety are preferred to the ambivalence and fragility of factual truth-telling.
At first glance, Foucault affirms Arendt’s position when he differentiates between ‘political’ and ‘philosophical parrhesia’ (1983, 35; original italics). Arendt’s rigid separation between the plurality of truth in the political realm and the singularity of THE truth in philosophy becomes blurred in Foucault’s account of philosophical parrhesia to which a political dimension pertains. Arendt holds onto this separation from a particular understanding of philosophy as the ivory tower from which injustice, inequality and inequity cannot be fought against. However, in philosophy, there is politics, and in politics (of resistance), philosophy can help us navigate through rugged terrains of ideas, concepts, claims and moral assumptions – this is the backdrop of Foucault’s account of the politics of philosophical parrhesia.
Parrhesia also connects to systems of oppression because philosophical parrhesia faces a ‘political predicament’ (Maxwell 2018, 24): it needs to be detached from power to remain at a critical distance while, at the same time, parrhesiastes must be close to power to confront its representatives – the king, the president – with truth, even if it may be a truth challenging the stability and routines of power. To navigate between this ambivalent and dangerous terrain, parrhesiastes rely on a critical inner dialogue to find truth and communicate it to the public. Foucault understands parrhesiastes as outsiders within – sometimes highly regarded by those in power – who are heard by the public because their status allows them to be acknowledged by those in power. Here, we might think of Gorman again, who stands so close to Biden on stage while she tells us about lives so far away from the life in the White (!) House. Is Gorman being heard because she is both close to and distant from power?
When Foucault enumerates criteria connected to parrhesia, its classist and gendered assumptions are disclosed more clearly. Truth-tellers are those who received a ‘good education’ enabling them to form an intellectually and morally demanding position from which they tell the truth (Foucault 1983, 25), – as is the case with Gorman, who studied at one of the US’s most prestigious colleges, Harvard. Additionally, the ‘parrhesiastic game’ (Foucault 1983, 3ff.) requires high standards of intellectuality and thus morality as a result of both the accumulation of knowledge and the elaboration of critical thinking, also directed towards oneself. (Foucault 1983, 3) Foucault never questions how a regime of organized lying disables populations from receiving such an education.
Moreover, because of their ethical integrity, parrhesiastes must tell the truth even when it results in life-threatening circumstances. The proof of their sincerity is their courage: if truth-tellers formulate something dangerous – differing from what the majority or the ruler believes, for instance – it indicates parrhesia. We are again reminded that gendered and racialized populations have been rendered mute by denouncing their ability to articulate their demands ‘properly’. Neither Arendt nor Foucault address that the notion of proper speech has been instrumentalized to silence racialized, gendered, disabled and poor populations. Neither challenge the idea that societies are built on imaginations of rightful speech and tropes of propriety.
Mere opinion and common sense – populist antagonists of truth-telling
Truth must fight both the propaganda of the opinion-holders and the false testimony of the (moral) majority. The similarity to mere opinion renders factual truth precarious because it becomes difficult to differentiate between factual truth and mere opinion in public discourse. When factual truth is conflated with mere opinion, however, ‘the chances of factual truth surviving the onslaught of power are very slim indeed’ (Arendt 2005, 297). This disadvantage of factual truth leads to severe consequences for the truth-teller and the political realm itself. When mere opinion reigns, plurality, which is constitutive for politics, withers. 6
Additionally, if opinion-holders are publicly disclosed as liars, they can quickly return to a flexible notion of opinion and sell it as one among others. Opinion-holders easily rephrase what they formerly framed as THE truth as just another opinion within the (democratic) competition of ideas. This perverse flexibility of opinion ― that it can be hyper-stable and ultra-flexible ― allows opinion-holders to insist on the righteousness of their opinion. At the same time, they deny the ‘gospel truth’ of their statement quickly if necessary (Arendt 2005, 307). The easy movement between adamant positions regarding what is ‘true’, ‘natural’ and ‘right’ on one side and the flexibility of truth on the other is a critical feature of contemporary masculinist populism. Shaped by this movement, mere ‘fact-checking’ cannot remedy populist post-truth discourse (Zerilli 2020). Pointing towards alternative facts serves as a strategy to simulate plurality while insisting on the existence of THE people – a homogenized and ‘natural’ community. Against populism’s nationalist, masculinist and ethno-sexist understanding of a deranged democracy, Gorman (2021) determinedly states, ‘while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated […]’. The flexibility of contemporary populist post-truth discourse is not given to factual truth-tellers and parrhesiastes. For ‘genuine’ truth-tellers, withdrawal is not an option: the integrity of those practicing ‘Socratic parrhesia’ forbids them to remain silent (Foucault 1983, 35ff.).
The fourth binary driving Arendt’s discussion on truth-telling consists of ‘genuine’ truth-telling, factual or Socratic, and common sense. 7 Common sense simplifies politics, renders it coherent, and forces a consensus, while politics and its modes of truth-telling are only sustained under conditions of cacophonous plurality. Factual truth ‘offends the soundness of common-sense reasoning’ (Arendt 2005, 307). The implicit consensus formed by common sense ‘relieves’ from thinking and turns, therefore a- or even antipolitical. Common sense as ‘non-thinking’ leads ‘individuals to accept values and conventions blindly, which means that a radically different code of values or set of conventions can be substituted for the existing ones, and no one will complain or even much notice’ (Allen 2002, 141). Non-thinking thus provides post-truth politics with a prerequisite to infiltrate politics and media coverage to manipulate them by ‘alternative facts’. In contemporary populism, referring to common sense is an e/affective strategy to denounce facts on inequality, discrimination, climate change or historical events. Often fuelled by anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, it claims to present an alternative ‘truth’ against the ‘cancel culture’ of liberal elites in politics, education and media. Donald Trump, Boris Johnson or Björn Höcke claim to tell ‘the truth’ against a liberal regime of organized lying. Their masculinist authoritarian populism laments that it is silenced behind politically correct ‘feeling rules’ (Gebhardt 2019, 3; Hochschild 2016, 135, 226ff.).
What Arendt understood as opinion or common sense, Foucault (1983, 3) refers to as parrhesia in a ‘pejorative sense’ to clarify that ‘not everyone when speaking frankly will tell the truth […]’ (Zerilli 2020, 12). ‘Bad parrhesia’ (Zerilli 2020, 12) appears, first, as ignorance, second, as strength, boldness and arrogance – features we find in the masculinist repertoire of (populist) politics. Third, it works by manipulation, as in the ‘alternative truths’-campaigns. Fourth, it manifests as a loud voice to generate affective reactions from the audience (Foucault 1983, 3), as we can observe in speeches of populist leaders. In conclusion, pejorative parrhesia leads to an ‘ignorant outspokenness’ (Foucault 1983, 25) which trenchantly describes the linguistic strategies prevalent in post-truth discourse.
‘Aflame and unafraid’ – feminist truth-telling: A summary
That even as we grieved, we grew
That even as we hurt, we hoped
That even as we tired, we tried
Amanda Gorman, “The Hill we Climb”
Arendt and Foucault are part of the archive – their works are deemed classics that are read and discussed globally. However, they tell stories of ‘the others’ – the oppressed and dehumanized killed in the Holocaust, the sexually ‘deviant’, or those considered ‘mad’. Their critique of power structures and their deconstruction of normalcy provide feminist and anti-racist struggles with an arsenal to fight power asymmetries and discrimination. Feminist truth-telling emphasizes the ‘politics in […] counter-archival practice, which tells the stories that haunt the archive and resist its erasure’ (Honig 2021, 98, original italics).
The truth-teller and parrhesiastes tell their truths against a corrupt, unjust and violent regime of lying as counter-hegemonic practice. Only from positions of inferiority exposed to violence, even death, do they tell truths. From that perspective, Gorman’s position within the regime of (un)truth can be scrutinized: is she facing ridicule when her poem is quoted and disseminated globally – and celebrated for its style and brilliance? Is she risking survival when she, by official invitation of the US president, takes the stage of the inauguration ceremony? And, more so, can we consider her a feminist truth-teller? No, and yes.
No, because Gorman was invited by a powerful man under the most secure condition of surveillance one can imagine. Indeed, she became even more famous on the invitation, patronage and courtesy of an old White man. We might even think of a certain tokenism Gorman represents on that stage crowded with White (male) people. In a self-critical reflection, Gorman herself denotes this ambivalence when she writes that ‘a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one […]’. Nevertheless, we can also answer yes, because Gorman radically challenges (White, male) privilege and the canonical history of the United States, which makes her a target for slander, hate speech, violence or even death. Can we imagine a situation in which the ‘skinny Black girl descended from slaves’ is not rendered precarious when confronting (White, male) supremacy – whether on the inauguration’s stage or while posting on social media or walking down an alley?
When we return to Gorman’s question, ‘where can we find light in this never-ending shade?’, Arendt teaches us that struggles against injustices and inequalities cannot be fought alone. A feminist theory that draws from her ideas teaches us that these political struggles often remain unrecognized: that feminist resistances are lost in the archive. Arendt and also Foucault provide feminist theories and practices with tools against erasure to retrieve those unheard voices from the archive’s sediment. To start, if not anew, then again, over and over, is part of a feminist repertoire of truth-telling that has been, still is, and will be relentless in its work of retrieval: against the normalization of (racialized and classist) misogyny and heterosexism, against the masculinism of populist post-truth, and against fantasies of supreme ethnicity and cultural homogeneity.
Feminist truth-tellers contaminate the archive and call for impropriety. They withstand the archival seductions of clear-cut power. They speak up, from the shadows, in manifold manifestations: as a ‘skinny Black girl’ (Gorman 2021), as fighters against catcalling, rape culture, slut-shaming, or as people challenging misogynic, (hetero-)sexist presidents. Feminist truth-telling can be embodied by everyone, in every corner of society, every day – even in the most improbable, improper places. In pitch-black darkness, the ever-present potential of truth-telling challenges the inner workings of power. That is the good news of Arendt’s and Foucault’s archival works: Those buried in the archive, those unseen and unheard by it, are not without hope. Let us bring light and some wit to the archive’s serious sobriety. Let us be audacious feminist truth-tellers who act in concert, stir (gender) trouble and climb that hill.
