By MARLÈNE COULOMB-GULLY*

Foreword to the recently released book by Amanda Braga and Carlos Piovezani

“Look, look! These words have not yet been thawed,” said Pantagruel. Then he threw several frozen words to us on the deck. They looked like pearls of many colors. Some of them were red, some green, and some blue, black, and gold. When we warmed them in our hands, they melted and we could hear them…” (François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, book IV, chap. 56).

1.

For a long time, women’s words resembled those frozen words that Rabelais spoke of. Their speeches were banned and their interventions were not heard. Women’s voices were also constantly criticized: “too high-pitched” or “too fragile”, “hysterical” or “shrill”.

In short, there was always a “too much”, there was always an excess. Women were constantly demeaned for their speeches, which continue to be depreciated, ridiculed, delegitimized and banned.

In contrast, the order of discourse and the field of public speech were constructed as spaces of male privilege: Come bonus dicendi peritus, that is, “The man “He who is able to speak is good,” wrote Cato the Elder, at the beginning of the Christian era.

The use of the noun “vir”, which means “man”, instead of “homo”, which is synonymous with “human”, gives the measure of how virility was raised to the condition of essential substance of this art of speaking well and how the initiative of speech was converted into one of the first and most fundamental manifestations of male identity. More than a speaker, man thus became a natural orator. This very “nature” is an invention of men. Naturally, they lie when they sustain this invention.

Following the long thread of male domination and the silencing imposed on women (but also of their resistance), Amanda Braga and Carlos Piovezani constructed this masterpiece. To construct it, the author adopted a critical and feminist approach in examining its long historical duration, an indispensable task for understanding the logic of this domination.

Thus, we are led along a path that dates back to Greek and Latin antiquity and that spans centuries and continents to show how this double paradigm that associates speech with the masculine world and silence with the feminine was formed and reproduced. This age-old opposition continues to mark practices and consciousness even today. In this opposition, the following contrast is forged: they have an ease in speaking and an unwillingness to give up their turn to speak, whereas elas have great difficulty in speaking up and making themselves heard.

Reflecting still in the heat of the moment on the revolutionary movement of May 68 in France, in his work The Word Prison, historian Michel de Certeau (1968) said: “Voices that had never been heard before changed us. We had the feeling that something unprecedented was happening: the silenced began to speak. We had the impression that this was the first time that this had happened. From every corner, dormant treasures or lived experiences that had never been able to express themselves emerged. At the same time, the discourses of power fell silent and the ‘authorities’ remained silent. Frozen existences awoke in a morning full of dreams. We took speech as our companions had taken the Bastille”. Not infrequently and to a large extent, speech still remains a Bastille to be taken by women.

2.

Brazil is a privileged center of gravity for this reflection on the silencing of female speech: zooms about what happened recently in Brazilian history with Dilma Rousseff, Manuela D'Ávila, Sâmia Bomfim and, evidently, with Marielle Franco, a woman from a disadvantaged social background, black and lesbian, who was murdered for having said what she said – as if she were an Olympe de Gouges, from centuries later and on the other side of the Atlantic, who was also killed for what she said in the midst of the French Revolution…

Sexism, misogyny and machismo know no boundaries of space or time. In any case, the reality and singularity of the silencing of Brazilian women are surgically analyzed here in Female speech.

But the reflections of Amanda Braga and Carlos Piovezani go far beyond this territorial framework. It is important to highlight here the formidable erudition of the author, who makes us hear the most diverse voices, whether they are the voices of the dominant, when they evoke, among others, the deadly ideologies of patriarchy, colonialism and fascism, or those of the dominated, who have to seek to break the silence and deconstruct this order of things: the extensive series of resistance fighters (among whom are Mary Astell or Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as Jeanne Derouin, Louise Michel or bell hooks, to mention just a few from the modern and contemporary world of the northern hemisphere) is certainly the consequence of the imposed violence, it is undoubtedly the effect of this “Shut up, woman”, which spans centuries and continents. #metoo is probably the last and most globalized avatar of this long struggle.

Anyone who does not have access to speech is reduced to silence or is spoken to by others, ceases to be a full subject of his/her own speech and tends to be converted into an object. “She/he”, “he/she”, in short, third persons, are largely excluded from the act of speech, that is, they are transformed into a “non-person”, as the linguist Émile Benveniste points out.

Therefore, there is nothing superfluous in the analysis of the conditions of the right and exercise of public speech. Quite the contrary, since it is something decisive in the life of each and every one of us. Indeed, the equal sharing of the most diverse voices and their access to public speech, conceived as a common good, are at the foundation of citizenship and are decisive elements of democratic vitality.

Becoming aware that places of speech and spaces of intervention constitute privileged elements of power relations is the first stage of a process that will allow us to conjure up the “male-diction"of female speech, that is, which will allow us to eliminate this curse of women's speech made and remade by machists. This is yet another of the many reasons why reading Female speech: silencing and resistance it is indispensable.

Reading it will certainly help the “frozen words” evoked by Rabelais to become “pearls of different colors,” so that women’s speeches, which were forbidden for so long, will be transformed into speeches full of life, which will increasingly function as small stones with which we will pave the path to equality.

*Marlene Coulomb-Gully is professor emeritus at the University of Toulouse II. Author of, among other books, Femmes in politics: finally avec les seconds rôles (Belin).

Reference

https://shre.ink/ekOQAmanda Braga e Carlos Piovezani. Female speech: silencing and resistance. New York, New York, 2025, 416 pages.https://shre.ink/ekOQ]

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