Feminized.

Why Is No One Talking about Muteness Envy? 

Lately, a lot of powerful people, especially men, have been loudly proclaiming themselves to be silenced, powerless victims. The phenomenon has become so widespread and predictable over the last several years that it can feel like its participants are following a set script. Think of Brett Kavanaugh’s tears during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings; of Kyle Rittenhouse sobbing before the courtroom; of Harvey Weinstein’s claim to shame when an accuser described his “deformed” genitals on the stand and photographic evidence was circulated amongst the jury; of the looped videos that interrupted Instagram feeds with superalgorithmic intensity of Johnny Depp silently shaking his head during Amber Heard’s testimony; of comedians taking the stage in soldout theaters or on widely streamed specials, not long after being “canceled” due to sexual assault allegations, to protest the suppression of their speech. Think of police officers and occupying soldiers insisting on their vulnerability as justification for shooting the unarmed; of presidents proclaiming themselves the victims of “witch hunts”; of tenured professors and securely employed staff writers for major publications wailing at the injustice of being “bullied” by adjuncts or trans people on the internet; of the general trend that the critic B. D. McClay has called the reign of “sore winners”— whiners who won’t admit they’re winners. 

As the feminist deconstructionist critic Barbara Johnson demonstrated in her promiscuously wide-ranging yet coolly coy essay “Muteness Envy,” published in 1996, these performances of reticence have been happening for a long time. Johnson’s essay diagnoses this pathology of the powerful as an appropriation of femininized “muteness” that gains a special kind of voice and power precisely through silencing and disempowerment. And it’s been around, she helps us see, for centuries, even millennia, often as a lyric voice. Lyric, after all, has always been the favored genre for anyone looking to win by losing. Lyric is wish fulfillment for people whose wish is that their wish won’t be fulfilled. Muteness envy shows us that if lyric has lost its power as a literary genre, it lives on, immortal as a laurel, as our crypto-dominant cultural one. “Muteness envy!” I’ve exclaimed silently to myself every time I’ve encountered a powerful person exclaiming about being silenced over the past few years, and then, silently, or sometimes to the void of the internet, I’ve asked: “Why is no one talking about muteness envy?”