Screening Parler Femme: Silences of the Palace, Antonia’s Line and Faithless

Abstract

As we saw in Chapter 1, the notion of parler femme has been central to much of Irigaray’s work, finding redefinition in the more recent writings as ‘the sexuation of discourse’. Parler femme is intricately bound up with the mother-daughter relation and with modalities of exchange between mothers and daughters that could be used to structure a feminine genealogical relation between them. The films scrutinized in this chapter are structured, to varying extents, through this relation between mothers and daughters. This chapter discusses how these films come to constitute spaces for the exploration of parler femme as it is set out in Irigaray’s writing. Before moving onto detailed scrutiny of the films, however, it seems appropriate to sketch a little more of the relation between parler femme and female genealogy.