In 2004, while accepting the Sydney Peace Prize at the University of Sydney, novelist and political activist Arundhati Roy said, “There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.” She was pushing back against the myth that oppressed groups are voiceless and need others to speak for them by acknowledging that the gaps in the discourse or debate or historical record are actually deliberate omissions and erasures. Silenced picks up on the same concerns and grapples with the social, professional, and political consequences of being one of the silenced, specifically of being a woman under patriarchy.

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