The Secret Life of Words: about women, narratives and kinds of violence

The aim of this paper is to expose how the symbolic violence that has permeated the tradition of Western cinematic representations is undermined in Coixet's The Secret Life of Words. The film attempts a subversion of the hegemonic narrative strategies of classical film by consciously "failing to repeat" the usual construction of a gendered gaze (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble). However, it also goes a further step by framing such a deconstruction within the context of physical violence against women in the Balkans War. Thus, by linking the representation of the memory of historical processes of violence with the undermining of the symbolic violence embodied in processes of representation, the movie achieves to explore the problematic relations between technologies of representation, femininity and violence (Teresa De Lauretis, Alice Doesn't).