“I Am Sick and Tired of Conforming”: On Emancipation Narratives

Abstract

The article presents an analysis of emancipation narratives (ENs), or autobiographical stories with a liminal plot which recount the first time the narrators identified with feminist ideas and/or values — an event we will refer to as feminist conversion. The study sample included 152 narratives in English (Internet posts and comments on the topics How did you become interested in feminism?; How did you/I become a feminist? and the collection Becoming feminists: An anthology of how we became feminists. Toronto, 2011). The narratives appeared online in 2009–2013 and were produced by women aged 15–65, all of them residents of the UK, USA and Canada and self-labelled feminists. Our findings suggest that ENs are a valuable source of evidence on the cultural, social and political factors which female narrators consider relevant to feminist conversion, as well as on the mechanisms involved in the narrative reconstruction of causes, consequences and axiological dimensions of conversion. Refs 40.