CAN THE SUBALTERN BE WOUNDED? ETHICAL LISTENING AND THE LIMITS OF SPEECH AS EMANCIPATION

Abstract

This article presents a critical analysis of the ethical and political limits of listening to subaltern voices, in dialogue with the essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Starting from the hypothesis that, in certain contexts of domination, subalternized subjects may utter and defend practices that harm their own interests, the argument is made that not every subaltern utterance is necessarily emancipatory. In situations of deep internalization of symbolic violence, listening, if not mediated by ethical and political critique, can legitimize practices that violate human dignity; conversely, a listening that claims the authority to correct the subaltern falls into the paternalism Spivak denounces. The methodology adopted is qualitative and interpretative in nature, based on a critical literature review and a comparative documentary analysis of four illustrative cases, built from secondary sources and public documents, without fieldwork. These include: female genital mutilation, examined through data on Egypt; the so-called “life interdictions”, labelled “Indigenous infanticide” in Brazilian public debate, with reference to the Suruwahá and the Kamayurá; the political mobilization of domestic workers in Brazil around Constitutional Amendment No. 72/2013, known as the Domestic Workers’ Amendment; and the resistance of Afghan women to Taliban rule after 2021. The first two cases allow the identification of conditions under which the uncritical reception of certain utterances could contribute to legitimizing violent practices, although they also record internal voices of refusal; the latter two allow the identification of conditions under which speech, when it finds collective organization and institutions able to receive it, could contribute to transformation, although the observed effects cannot be attributed to listening alone. The article concludes that listening to the subaltern is a necessary condition for epistemic justice, but not a sufficient one. Ethical listening requires discernment, critical mediation, and attention to the sociocultural contexts in which speech is produced, and the article proposes criteria to guide it: agency under constraint, absence of coercion, internal contestability of norms, access to resources, and institutions of recognition. In this way, the article contributes to debates on representation, multiculturalism, and epistemic injustice, rejecting both the uncritical listening that romanticizes all peripheral utterances as inherently liberating and the disqualification of such utterances.