Recent scholarship across feminist studies, postcolonial studies, and conflict studies has increasingly turned to the question of how women narrate, interpret, and resist experiences of war and social upheaval. Scholars such as Cynthia Enloe, Judith Butler, and Achille Mbembe have emphasized how violence, militarization, and political crisis reshape gendered experiences of citizenship, vulnerability, and resistance. At the same time, literary and cultural scholars like Carole Boyce Davies, Florence Stratton and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have shown that women’s testimonies and cultural productions offer alternative archives of conflict that challenge official narratives and expose the often-silenced social and emotional dimensions of war. Building on this body of work, this session explores how women’s cultural production and representation challenge dominant narratives of conflict by foregrounding voices that have historically been silenced or overlooked.
This session contributes to that conversation by bringing together scholars who examine how women’s voices emerge across different media – literature, film, and digital storytelling – and across distinct but interconnected forms of conflict, including domestic violence, armed warfare, cultural constraint, and post-traumatic recovery. Rather than treating these forms of conflict separately, the panel proposes to read them relationally, revealing how women’s narratives reveal the continuum between private and public violence. By examining how women narrate and interpret these experiences, the session demonstrates how storytelling, testimony, and cultural expression become sites for negotiating power, survival, and agency.
The panel begins with Dr. J. Ariane Ngabeu’s paper, “Silenced No More: Women’s Voices, Domestic Conflict, and Digital Resistance in Viens on reste by Marcelle Kuetche.” Her presentation analyzes how Marcelle Kuetche’s selected web series transforms everyday domestic life into a site of political critique, showing how digital storytelling platforms allow women to challenge normalized patterns of domestic conflict and gender inequality. By foregrounding digital media, Dr. Ngabeu highlights how contemporary technologies expand the spaces in which women’s voices circulate and gain visibility.
Dr. Leon Mwamba Tshimpaka’s paper, “High Heels Citizenship in Turbulent Africa: Congolese Women’s Agency and Protracted Conflict in the Kivu,” extends the discussion from the domestic sphere to the geopolitical realities of armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. His analysis explores how women living in the Kivu region develop adaptive strategies of leadership, negotiation, and survival, illustrating how gendered forms of citizenship emerge under conditions of prolonged instability.
Dr. Amina Saidou’s paper, “Women’s Voices and the Power of Munyal: Catalyzing Conflict in Djaïli Amadou Amal’s The Impatient,” shifts the focus to literary representation, examining how the cultural concept of munyal, often translated as patience or endurance, structures gender relations in Fulani society. Her analysis demonstrates how the expectation of silent endurance can intensify emotional and social tensions, revealing how cultural norms both constrain and provoke women’s forms of resistance.
Finally, Patience Odeh’s paper, “Dispoietic Bends: Non-Voiced Communication in Sub-Saharan Francophone Women’s Warscape Narratives,” examines dispoiesis, the bending or distortion of the self as an adaptive response to extreme violence, as a framework for understanding non-voiced modes of communication in contemporary Sub-Saharan African Francophone women’s warscape narratives. By interrogating how conventional notions of voice privilege speech and testimony, her paper shows how women in conflict zones communicate, resist, and reconstitute themselves through practices of becoming, care, solidarity, and education that operate beyond the reach of silencing.
Together, these papers demonstrate how women’s narratives and narratives about women illuminate the interconnected nature of different forms of conflict, from domestic tensions and cultural expectations to armed warfare and the effects of trauma. By bringing literary analysis, film studies, political analysis, and digital media studies into conversation, the panel creates a multidisciplinary dialogue that highlights how women’s voices reshape our understanding of conflict, memory, and resilience across diverse cultural contexts.
The session is designed to encourage active discussion among panelists and audience members. Each presenter will speak for approximately twelve minutes, leaving ftwenty minutes for a moderated discussion and collective reflection. Rather than functioning as a series of isolated presentations, the panel invites participants to consider how different disciplinary approaches can deepen our understanding of the relationship between gender, violence, and narrative representation. Through this discussion, the session aims to generate new insights into how storytelling by and about women documents experiences of conflict and transforms them into powerful forms of resistance, memory, and social critique.