« Sous un sour silence »

Abstract

In a committed world to silence, like prison was during the 19th century, noises take on a specific meaning. The prohibition to speak affects prisoners’ daily life and their sociabilities in Cadillac’s and Montpellier’s central women prisons in the south of France, from the 19th century to the early 20th century. Sonic atmosphere is characterized by sounds voluntarily introduced by prison administration for disciplinary purpose—like silence itself—but also by transgressive sounds that this framework proscribes and creates. They are the expression of detainees’ determination to find ways to communicate together, eagerly seeking to break this breathless silence, materialization of their loneliness. Some are the signal of individual or collective rebellion. But, more often, screams and their alter ego tears, are just prison suffering echoes, through which the usual elusive personal experience of seclusion takes shape. Sensory approach also offers a new angle of penal theory genealogy, to which silent order conforms.

Keywords

• prison
• women
• gender
• sounds
• sensory