ricardienne | commonplace book: human rights, feminism, and Aeschylus

So the "democratic state" in this essay is both Aeschylus' Athens and the modern U.S., and "suppliant women" should be understood as both italicized and not. In both the ancient tragedy and the contemporary crisis, foreign women recall the state to its most fundamental democratic principles, reminding it of its supreme freedom, goods, and equality. In both cases, the appeal of suppliant women mobilizes the state and challenges it to live up to its own founding ideas. But Spivak urges us to ask about the ramifications of this dynamic for the suppliant women themselves. In "Can the Subaltern Speak?" she suggests that such pre-scripted sentences as "white men save brown women from brown men" necessarily overwrite the women's own speech. When the Western state undertakes to represent the foreign woman politically, it also represents her discursively, slotting her into a narrative that evacuates her political agency and replaces her indigenous voice with its own righteous action
--V. Wohl, "Suppliant Women and the Democratic State: White Men Saving Brown Women from Brown Men" in When Worlds Elide: Classics, Politics, Culture, edd. Karen Bassi and J.P. Euben. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010. 409-436