The relationship between silence itself and silencing as a harmful speech act has
not been fully laid out, either in feminist scholarship or in silence scholarship.
Accounts of the harm of silencing tend to rely on a tacit understanding of what
silence and silencing are, and this tacit understanding is not strongly connected
with philosophical accounts of the phenomenon of silence itself. The connection
between silence and silencing is usually not one of bare measurable audible output;
instead, since silencing frequently involves a practice whereby articulated
utterances are discounted, the silence must be a structural silence related to the
silences that structure narratives and arguments. Structural silence itself is not
harmful; thus, the harm in silencing must be connected to our tendency to take our
narrative constructions of real events as perfect representations of reality itself.
