RETHINKING THE SILENCE: A ME TOO MOVEMENT THEORY ANALYSIS OF FEMALE VOICE IN CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST FICTION
Keywords:
Feminist Fiction, Female Voice, #Metoo Movement, Patriarchal Silencing, Narrative Strategies, Trauma Testimony, Intersectionality, Feminist Narratology, Institutional Credibility, Post-#Metoo LiteratureAbstract
The current research is based on the theoretical framework of #MeToo movement discourse and aims to analyze female voice in modern feminist fiction. The study's background is derived from the cultural and epistemological shift that occurred as a result of the #MeToo movement of 2017, which has almost completely turned female testimony from private confession to a collective political act, thus altering the landscape of feminist literary production. This goal is to investigate the techniques of contemporary feminist writers in representing, challenging, and asserting female voice against the mechanisms of silencing by the patriarchal system in institutional, archival, and cultural contexts. This study is based on a tripartite theoretical approach that combines the feminist narratology, trauma theory and #Metoo discourse theory. The method used is qualitative research using close textual analysis and feminist literary criticism as the main data analysis techniques. The primary corpus consisted of five contemporary feminist novels published from 2017 to 2024, which were chosen using purposive sampling, with 35 peer-reviewed secondary sources, 10 author interviews and 8 critical reviews included. The results show that post-#MeToo feminist fiction uses formal fragmentation, polyphony and generic hybridity to perform feminist resistance, as well as continually undermining patriarchal credibility regimes, institutional silencing, and the neoliberal requirement for women's resilience. The study concludes that contemporary feminist fiction is an important area of intersectional feminist praxis.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Maryam Abid, Sabiha Khan, Adeel Shahzada (Author)
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