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Weldt-Basson, Helene Carol. Subversive Silences: Nonverbal Expression and Implicit Strategies in the Works of Latin American Women Writers. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2009. 277 pp.
Helene Weldt-Basson's brief Preface leads the reader down the path "From Feminism to Gender Theory" (9-12), by cleverly intertwining the three basic premises of her book. First, "the creation of a general feminist perspective through textual structures can be a useful concept for understanding Latin American and Latina women's literature" (1 1). Second, silence, "a signifier that traditionally connotes male domination and female passivity, . . . has been appropriated . . . precisely to subvert silence's patriarchal meaning and invest it with a combative dimension [through] the employment of parody, irony, and other indirect strategies" (11). Third, "this reversal . . . prefigures the so-called performance turn of third-wave feminism" (11).
Then, the first of nine chapters "Language and Silence: A Theoretical Overview" anchors "Women's Problematic Relationship to Language" by providing a summary of "The Muted-Group Theory," which posits that "public discourse has evolved as a male-dominated instrument [because] women throughout history have been excluded from the public sphere, [therefore] language . . . inadequately expresses uniquely female zones of experience" (18). The section is complemented by an overview of French Feminism, focusing on the notion of " écriture féminine" (18-20), and concludes by summarizing different positions on the muted-group theory within feminist Sociolinguistic Theory (20-21). Muriel Saville-Troike's work, which "links language to silence by viewing both as communicative strategies" (21), allows Weldt-Besson to return to the focus of the text, and thus acknowledge previous contributions to the field, such as those of feminist critics Amy Kaminsky, Sara Castro-Klarén, Marjorie Agosín, Josefina Ludmer, Lucía Cunninghham, Elaine Showalter, and Debra Castillo (22-24). Further contextualization includes previous "books on silence in women writers of other...