Christina Dalcher’s Vox: An Inquiry in to the Epistemic Erasure of Feminine Articulation

Abstract

Vox, a spine thrilling novel by Christina Dalcher talks about the power structure that enforces a draconian regime of silence that targets women. Women in that speculative fiction are restricted to speak only hundred words per day highlighting Dalcher’s statement of “one hundred years in reverse is actually possible.” Dalcher’s novel acts as a speculative narrative of epistemic violence in which the entanglement of language, ideology and technology is sensed. By foregrounding language as a central axis of power, the novel unravels the entanglement of disciplinary regimes such as bodily, spatial and epistemological resulting in the systemic erasure of women’s social participation. Accordingly, this paper underscores the dramatization of marginalized people whose voices are dismissed in hegemonic discourse. At its core, the novel offers a speculative framework of marginalization where women in the novel are not just silenced but are crafted as epistemically disqualified.