On languaging and being heard: Communicating in malas lenguas

This article recovers, reinterprets and re-situates the voices of different subalternized women, theorizing them as a genealogy of what I call communicating in malas lenguas that has been too often unjustly silenced in the communication discipline. I focus on ‘languages’ as ideological inventions to highlight the connection between differentiated knowledge, on the one hand, and the ‘lenguas’ in which they are articulated, on the other hand. Establishing a dialogue with the idea-actions of María Lugones, bell hooks, Silvia Rivera-Cusicanqui or Yásnaya Aguilar, I draw attention to a series of ‘monolinguistic tyrannies’, such as correction, minoritization or normalization of reified ‘languages’ that act as instruments of cultural and material decapitalization, and thus need to be actively challenged. This challenging, I argue, involves recovering and validating historical discursive tools of resistance – conceptualized here as malas lenguas – such as irony, wordplay, ambiguity and ultimately all symbolic, non-transparent and complex dimensions of language and communication.