Introduction: Narrative Entanglements and Discursive Entrapments

Abstract

Narrative Entanglements and Discursive Entrapments JoAnn Conrad (bio) The space available to our movement is a constricted space. —Iris Marion Young, "Throwing Like a Girl," 143 This special issue of Narrative Culture examines the intersection of narrative genres and gender through the theme of abduction/containment/sequestering and otherwise disappearing of women. The originary moment of this special issue occurred at the International Society for Folk Narrative Research interim conference in Ragusa in 2018 with a remarkable convergence of papers. Their common thread of containment, explored in different genres and different contexts, offered the potential for new perspectives on gender, genre, and the field of folklore and its role in the relationship of the two. This collection of articles also comes about as the raw edge of pervasive and relentless gender inequality has come to the foreground of public discourse. The #MeToo movement, begun in 2006, achieved broader public awareness in 2017 with a social media campaign that challenged the (master) narrative about women's experience of sexual microaggressions and abuse. #MeToo reopened the issue of sexual abuse and violence against women, a phenomenon socially and politically tolerated in and by powerful men, if not perpetrated by them. The high-profile court cases associated with #MeToo led to a fuller social recognition of systemic gender inequality and the aggressions against women's bodies that are conditions of that inequality. [End Page 7] In Ragusa and after, we felt that perhaps the field of folkloristics could also be experiencing such a moment—one that could challenge well-worn disciplinary presumptions and practices, particularly with relation to gender ideologies. Prisoner of Her Sex In this issue, we see containment as the active, pervasive, and persistent corporeal, social, sexual, political, psychological, and cultural constraints imposed on women that work to our diminishment, dissolution, and delimiting, which are repeated in daily injustices and representations that are so ubiquitous as to be unremarkable if not invisible. Narratives of containment, and their omnipresent underlying threats of violence both textual and physical, work to assert and normalize patriarchal privilege. In the operations of such a gender ideology, "'woman' has been discursively constructed (condemned) as inferior yet also threatening to man, thus in perpetual need of containment and control and subjected (condemned) to particular disciplinary techniques" (King 30). The data is indisputable: in Europe, 1 in 3 women has experienced physical and/or sexual violence since the age of 15; 50 women die every week from male domestic violence; and every second woman has faced sexual harassment (European Women's Lobby). Globally, the World Health Organization has identified femicide (the "intentional murder of women because they are women"; WHO "Understanding," emphasis added) as a growing threat, increasing in some regions disproportionately to general homicide rates (Borgen Project). In the United States, femicide has been called an invisible epidemic, and yet "because it's normalized we don't see it as a crisis" (quoting Jodie Roure in Anguiano; see also Yancy). Often the mutilation and disfigurement of the women's bodies goes well beyond the level of injury required to bring about death, revealing the deep-seated misogyny at the heart of the motive: "Sadism is the point" (Nazario). It is culture that facilitates femicide by normalizing and thus perpetuating violence against women. The prison of gender (female) has been constructed by the systematic physical and textual violence that inscribes social oppression onto the body of woman "shaped by histories and practices of containment and control" (Bordo 21). She is a prisoner because of and in her sex. The "mastery" of the female body, its punishment and containment, serves as an emphatic affirmation of (male) power and dominance. The forms and means of containment expand beyond the cave, the cell, and the cellar to encompass [End Page 8] motifs not typically associated with the act of containment: the family, marriage (the happy ending), beauty, fashion, self-disfigurement, and the female body itself all are forms of imprisonment. In an impossible double bind, woman is trapped in her body, and her body is trapped in "woman." Seen through this lens, fashion and adornment—think of the unbearable weight of a gown of the moon and the stars, corsets, or disfiguring...