The Maintenance of Patriarchal Order Through Silencing

Abstract

This article explores how the management of female speech is one of the most effective mechanisms for maintaining the patriarchal order through the imposition of silence. By analyzing the literary enunciative power of a young Cameroonian author interested in various sites of patriarchal violence, it shows how the mechanisms of invisibilization, marginalization and silencing of cadets of all kinds operate. The injunction of silence is part of an ecology of patriarchal positions and stances held by central and auxiliary agents of policing. Silencing as the production of absence and the erasure of the noise surrounding the female condition, creates a confrontation between desire and institution at the heart of a discourse order (in Michel Foucault’s sense). The article is based on a dialogue and a reflexive return to ethnographic findings, illuminated by a literary narration of the female condition in Idool. It highlights the tension between a claimed but largely unsuccessful fictionalization and a social transgression as a driving force for self-determination.