Seen and heard: Silence and speech in Spanish women's postwar short stories and films
Description
Traditionally, the silence of women and other minorities has been considered solely in terms of repression, lack, or an absence of voice which must be overcome at all cost by shouts of protest. Because the marginalized have often been rendered voiceless in the hegemonic cultural and political economy, feminist theories tend to repudiate silence entirely in an effort to dispel stereotypes of women as inscrutable, speechless, and passive. At the same time, women have learned the danger of attempting to resist patriarchal dominance through hegemonic language. Yet, how does one refuse to be silenced if not through the voice? One of the most creative strategies that Spanish women artists in particular employ is to fight 'fire with fire,' that is, to use silence against silence. In co-opting the silence imposed by Francoist ideology, these writers, directors, and their characters propel the terms of their former subjection into new contexts, and subvert linguistic interpellation by consistently re-articulating their own formulation as subjects through non-linguistic means In the following chapters, I examine the appropiation of silence in the short stories of Merce Rodoreda and Carme Riera and in films by Arantxa Lazcano and Azucena Rodriguez which concern life under the dictatorship, from the post Civil War period through to the last oppressive years of Francoism. All of the texts share a common distrust of hegemonic language as the supplier of objective knowledge, and employ nonverbal methods of telling to undermine the authority of words. This guarded distance from dominant discourse takes on particular resonance in the case of the Catalan and Basque authors/directors for whom autonomous language was legally prohibited and hegemonic language, Castilian Spanish, forcefully imposed during the thirty-six years of Franco's rule With this project, I propose to demonstrate the differences within silence and speech, not between them. Like the works studied in this dissertation, I strive to undermine the reification of silence as an essentially feminine trait, at the same time that I seek to counter reductive perspectives with respect to silence by exploring its many forms and functions