Patriarchy and Alterity: Reconsidering (Female) Identity and its Construction

The film Nil by Mouth (1997) deals with the behaviour, culture and ideology of a working class family living in the London suburbs, whose pater familias earns his money from crime and employs violence not only to obtain his ends, but also for sheer delight. In particular, the paper explores this case study to show that the definition of Alterity as something ‘bad’ is functional to the establishment and maintenance of inequality. The second major aim of this paper is to show how language reflects and constructs the ideology of Alterity and to illustrate some of the cinematographic techniques employed to convey the same message, either in addition to or in close combination with linguistic devices. Multimodality thus lies at the heart of the analysis, despite the fact that language occupies pride of place in the analysis since the first objective is to lay bare the modes and workings of patriarchal ideology and the consequent subjection of the Other