Confide in Me: Feminism and the Making of the Female Subject
We can learn a lot about patriarchy in a given society through stories that its culture makes available about what it means to be a woman. But we also learn about feminism, as an oppositional cultural discourse, through stories women tell about living in defiance of prescribed codes of female existence. Whether in television, film, theater, literary fiction and non-fiction, social media, or activism, stories challenging the traditional emplotment of women’s lives around romance, marriage, and motherhood have proliferated over the last two decades in Lebanon. While most of these stories cannot be strictly situated within the cultural orbit of feminism, they all interrogate traditional feminine archetypes and share an emphasis on female friendship, kinship, and solidarity. This project investigates changes in Lebanon’s sex-gender system at the level of narrative. It shows how a modern female subjectivity is produced around and through a confessional and testimonial culture characterized by the telling of invisible and unspoken aspects of female experience. By tracing this narrative fever across cultural genres and creative industries, the project aims at interrogating the therapeutic, political, and commercial value of making the personal public and to probe emancipatory possibilities and limits of women’s auto/biographical practices.