Bodyscapes of silence: The figure of the mute woman in the cinema

Abstract

Always concerned with resisting the historical silencing of women, feminism has been especially sensitive to questions of language, attempting to define the authenticity of ‘he female ‘voice’. This article considers the dichotomy that has permeated the feminist debate on the political implications of women's silence. More specifically, its aim is to explore the traces of this debate in the cinema by focusing on the figure of the mute woman as represented in a group of films of significantly varied nature and authorship. Concentration here on the acoustic rather than the visual slightly departs from a long‐established tradition of film criticism which, particularly in its feminist developments, has prioritised discussions of the image, its constructions and its pleasures whereas comparatively little attention has been devoted to the way in which women's relationship to speech is represented in the cinema.

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