Personal Narratives of Street Sexual Harassment: How Autoethnography Can Give Voice to Women’s Silence

• In Event: Safety and Street Harassment: Resistance in Stories and in Silence

Abstract

Through this autoethnographic project I narrate my personal experiences of street sexual harassment as an Iranian woman “to connect the personal to the cultural”. I argue that personal narratives of women about their everyday experiences of street sexual harassment is a valuable resource for moving between the inner vulnerable experience and the outer, social, political, cultural, and historical experiences. Autoethnographic narratives incorporate personal reflexive dimensions to search for a deeper understanding of the connectivity between the self and the social. Personal narratives can reveal how emotions are experienced in the context of everyday life, and how discourses define the rules with which such emotions are to be experienced. Uttering these narratives are particularly important in patriarchal contexts in which experiences of sexual harassment are ought to remain unspoken and silenced. Making intricate details of one’s life accessible to others in the public discourse can be a way of giving voice to experiences that are, otherwise, shrouded in secrecy. Thus, the act of telling a personal story, a story of both victimization and defiance, is important for deconstructing discourses of shame and the larger discourses in which women’s voices are not heard. I also argue that various dimensions of Iranian women’s experiences, such as their silent reactions to the experiences of sexual harassment, can remain unexplored if Western conceptualizations of resistance are imposed on women in non-western contexts. Through this imposition different forms of resistance and rebellion that do not match the Western standard of out-loud, self-assertive and aggressive protest might easily be glossed over. Through my autoethnographic project, I explore my silent reactions to the experiences of street harassment not as a sign of passivity or lack of voice, but as a strategic tool for resistance and transformation. Telling personal narratives, thus, helps us with the project of listening to silences.

Author

• Fae Chubin, University of South Florida