IRTG Diversity University of Trier DM 242
Phone	+49 651 201 2203
E-Mail	atalie.gerhard@uni-saarland.de

Diversity and Resistance in North American Women’s Containment Narratives from the 21st Century

(Supervisor: Astrid Fellner, Saarland / Heike Paul, Erlangen-Nürnberg
Mentoring: Paul Morris, Winnipeg)

At the beginning of the 21st century, more women of diverse ethnic and political backgrounds narrate experiences of containment than ever before, while increased criminalization insufficiently accounts for this phenomenon. Narratives of contained women from and in diverse contexts serve as critical sites for knowledge formation, because they simultaneously depict social issues, challenge legislation, and imagine restorative futures.

My corpus material reflects a diversity of women’s perspectives on containment in narratives. I closely read how women in North America process markers for victimization and stigmatization, such as race, gender, sexuality, religion, and political affiliation in narratives that invoke discourses of struggle and create agency over suffering by strategically appealing to the public for acknowledgment or understanding. For already stigmatized women, institutional containment appears to be a condition of life which is informed by legacies of discriminatory stereotypes, not only in the penal context.
In my discussions, I contextualize how women in Canada and the U.S.
narrate suffering in the first two decades of the new millennium compared to traditional North American genres of containment literature, including slave narratives, captivity narratives, and trauma testimonies.

In my thesis, I argue that by negotiating between ideals of liberty and realities of exclusion, these texts exemplify strategies of resisting containment by uniting over shared cultural imaginaries across different identity markers. With its focus on contained diversity through the lens of gender, my project also probes the limits of representing female solidarity. My subjects of analysis invite timely and urgent comparative discussions about collective self-images circulating in Canada and the U.S.