Urbanism, Transgression and the Feminist Re-appropriation of the Gaze: Contesting Gender Roles in A Question of Silence

Gender, Sexuality, and Urban Spaces: Conference 2011 Working Papers Collection 2012 In her 1982 film A Question of Silence, Dutch feminist filmmaker Marleen Gorris poses an astute critical commentar y on the performance of femininity and the enactment of gender roles within the rigid patriarchal conventions of an ostensibly liberal urban society. Through Gorris’s cinematic lens, the delineation of her subjects’ personal and cultural boundaries are presented as inextricably bound with the spatial and institutional realms they occupy, thus informing their repressed identities as subjects in need of personal and social gratification. Her female protagonists, who only occupy peripheral social roles and institutional spaces, commit the ferocious murder of a shop owner, when he condescendingly affirms his position as the emblem of patriarchy. By aver ting the transgression of shoplifting, an act committed in an erratic attempt to destabilize the sexist status quo asphyxiating the protagonists, the victim unites them in a liberating violent eruption and an idiosyncratic omer ta. My paper, “Urbanism, Transgression and the Feminine Re-appropriation of the Gaze,” explores the ways in which the protagonists are contained and confined by their physical surroundings, the urban landscape, their domestic environment and the social institutions demarcated by Gorris as the cradle of patriarchy. I argue that the women’s struggle to reclaim those spaces through their personal narratives and the disruptive effect of their silence and laughter is a conscious attempt to reconfigure the ways in which they are envisaged by society. Moreover, I argue that the intricate web of multiple gazes imposed on women in the film is re-appropriated by them as a means of acknowledging their denigrated status and consequently orchestrating the fatal attack. The implementation of Mulvey’s theoretical assertions concerning the application of the gaze enables the possibility of redress, while the protagonists’ final confinement in prison evokes Foucauldian notions of sur veillance and control, which