Introduction
Women’s voices are often suppressed not only by external patriarchal structures but also through internalized sexism within female social networks. Feminist discourse often foregrounds male-perpetrated violence and silencing, yet a subtler form of oppression persists within women’s interactions: internalized sexism that masquerades as solidarity. Situated within feminist contexts—including #MeToo’s uneven outreach and discursive exclusions—this personal narrative argues that feminist progress must include unmasking how women impede each other’s voices. It proposes autoethnography via creative media—writing, film, performance—as one of the methods of both self-reflection and resistance, enabling women to author their truths and subvert patriarchal narratives.
The article examines internalized silencing through two characters inspired by real-life subjects —Jenny and Evilyn—who epitomize how women can perpetuate patriarchal narratives under the guise of two opposing acts of caregiving and glamour. Jenny’s refusal to return a borrowed book becomes a symbolic deceit; Evilyn’s persistent promises dissolve under scrutiny. These patterns mirror broader social dynamics, where both women uphold prescribed roles in a capitalist patriarchy through silence, performance, and emotional manipulation. This piece thereby explores how internalized sexism among repressed women can manifest through performative roles of gaslighting, inhibiting feminist solidarity, and perpetuating patriarchal norms. Through two fictional vignettes—Jenny, the archetypal “perfect mother” who withholds a borrowed book, and Evilyn, the wealth-drifting benefactor whose promises evaporate in lieu of more capitalist gains—we examine how women can silence each other while masking unhealed trauma. These characters also symbolize the function of patriarchy in perpetuating repressed female compliance and performance. Drawing from feminist theory on performativity, epistemic injustice, and internalized patriarchy, the article situates these narratives in the broader context of #MeToo and feminist discourse. Using autoethnographic reflection, I contrast these internalized roles in casual violence with my self-reflective practice in autoethnographic storytelling as both personal and political refusal of silencing that is rooted in sexist practices. The article argues that reclaiming voice through creative media offers an ethical path and poetic justice toward subverting internalized oppression and fostering a feminist solidarity, reflective of transparency and authenticity.
Familial Silencing and Early Trauma
In documenting my journey, moving from traumatic events toward creative agency exemplifies how navigating family abuse, intimate partner harassment, and societal expectations can illuminate the broader dynamics of silencing. In my Feminism in India essay, I archived how I left these abusive environments to pursue a PhD on fame, seeking to honor my mother: she was forbidden from becoming a Bollywood actress and stage dancer because of sexism, and I overcame its harassment I continually faced in addressing structural inequalities. Establishing the Centre for Media and Celebrity Studies (CMCS) became one of the ways to empower women to take creative and financial control in the post-Weinstein era. Yet, the path to voice was neither linear nor solitary; silencing, gaslighting, and betrayal occurred in both male and female, external and internal forms. In this article, I reflect on my lived experiences since my publication on #MeToo in Feminism in India—spanning familial coercion, sexual harassment, and relational oppression—and situate them in a feminist theoretical framework, while using fictionalized case vignettes to illustrate how women can sometimes perpetuate patriarchal patterns. My essay in Feminism in India has led to an independent feature film, The Critic, that explores the aftermath of death and violence. Specific details of past loss have been overshadowed in the film for a pressing need to show future resolutions. On February 6, 2018, as documented in the essay, I called my uncle Sailab Nandy to reconnect a year after my father’s death. His eldest brother, Manesh, had long acquired ancestral inheritance to privilege his own sons, one of whom manipulated me to engage in his sexual activity when I was age eight and continues to stalk online for financial opportunities that historically I was denied as a girl child. During the call, my uncles trivialized my grief and minimized my father’s life, simplistically labeling me a “problem child” on the anniversary of my father’s death. Such interactions illustrate epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007): my losses were delegitimized, my perceptions were doubted, and my memory was discounted. This is part of a family history, demonstrating how patriarchal power structures operate within households, shaping both material and emotional inequities. My attempts to articulate my grief and needs were interrupted, dismissed, and silenced—a microcosm of the broader societal mechanisms that often invalidate feminist voices even among women. Women, even when highly educated or empowered, can be rendered powerless within these relational networks.
Internalized Patriarchy Among Women: Case Vignettes
Beyond familial male oppression, internalized sexism among women can perpetuate silencing and gaslighting. Two vignettes—fictionalized, but reflective of real patterns—illustrate this phenomenon among women who are aware of the above history. In 2025, a family friend named Jenny, presenting the archetypal “perfect mother,” borrowed a book by a Catholic Father. Unlike my uncles, the Father carried an ethics of care for my dad, but Jenny neither returned his book nor the memory of my dad associated with him. On the surface, this appears trivial—a minor lapse in etiquette—but this casual violence is emblematic of deeper patterns of exclusion that overlap with greater injustice. Jenny’s identity is mystified in performative perfection: maternal, dutiful, domesticated, and polished in structured ways that capitalist patriarchy praises. Beneath the façade, however, lies her childhood spent in deprivation and neglect, unhealed and unresolved. Her silence toward other women mirrors the silence imposed upon her as a child in a slum of Eastern India, and her deception—small lies and repeated promises that never materialize—now functions as a form of power over those around her.
On one hand, Jenny’s physical presence mirrors her emotional patterns. She is a suburban woman ensconced in the roles of mother, daughter, and wife that overpower any trauma or lack from her own childhood. She borrows a book written by a Father, who once helped to get married into a capitalist society and Settler-Colonialist nation of Canada during her impoverished times in postcolonial India, but now performs narrative strategies to “forget” to return a memory that belies deeper erasure. Her identity is anchored in performative perfection, but that erases memories of a past that required care. Her silence extends not only to trauma, but to the voices of many urban women: materially privileging the appearance perfect family that shields them from confronting unresolved personal trauma and, in the process, inflicts harm on other women, marginalized with causes like #MeToo. Ironically, #MeToo narratives, particularly in India, are largely amplified by urban, middle-class women, while testimonies from rural, caste-oppressed, and minority women remain marginalized. Scholars argue that feminist solidarity must actively include these unrepresented voices, but still remains challenged by characters like Jenny, who are silent and / or silencing.
On the other hand, Evilyn, a colleague in Canadian real estate, occupies the opposite performative spectrum: she is the glamorous woman, whose language and demeanor exude benevolence, but whose actions consistently misuse wealth and fail to match her promises. Raised under an abusive father, Evilyn’s signature word used is “honey.” She used this word to offer references and meetings, but none arrived. Her sweetness in the over usage of the word “honey” masks a bitter absence. She sustains a patriarchal illusion through overpromising women on the margin; her gaslighting blurs agency into invalidation. Evilyn’s performances also reveal how trauma can be internalized and externalized in forms that maintain patriarchal hierarchies in ownership. She, too, relies on high investments in material that signifies luxury comfort—to navigate her world while avoiding vulnerability and responsibility. By cloaking manipulation in charisma, Evilyn exercises a subtle power over women who, trusting in her word, may be sidelined during urgent situations.
In both cases, social behaviors reflect internalized patriarchy and the displacement of an ethical voice. Both refuse accountability and confrontation of acknowledgments, favoring comfort over truth. Judith Butler’s (1990) theory of performativity elucidates these patterns. Gender, and the roles associated with it, are not innate; they are enacted, repeated, and socially reinforced. Jenny and Evilyn’s performances illustrate how social norms can be internalized and enacted in ways that uphold patriarchal power. Their actions demonstrate that oppression is not only imposed from outside but can be reproduced as a result of repression within networks of women. Butler’s notion of gender performativity highlights how social norms become embodied through repeated acts. In patriarchal contexts, women may internalize roles—“perfect mother,” “dutiful daughter,” or “benevolent benefactor”—as performative scripts that exclude dissent and authenticity that feminism requires.
Gaslighting and epistemic injustice found in the above roles are illuminated by Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice, with which we can underscore how individuals can be made to doubt their perceptions. When this occurs among women, internal dynamics of solidarity fracture and feminist movements risk complicity in silencing. Miranda Fricker’s (2007) concept of epistemic injustice further provides a framework for understanding how women’s voices are undermined by other women. In the cases of Jenny and Evilyn, silence and deception prevent acknowledgment of harm, distort reality, and delegitimize claims for support vital for a feminist ethics of care. Their gaslighting mirrors patriarchal forms of silencing, illustrating that the internal mechanisms of oppression can be as insidious as external ones.
Sara Ahmed’s (2017) work on feminist killjoys contextualizes the above dynamics. Women who challenge hierarchical norms or demand accountability are often labeled difficult or problematic in a patriarchal society; Jenny and Evilyn, in contrast, avoid accountability, preserving appearances while perpetuating systemic inequities. Their behaviors exemplify how trauma and privilege intersect with gendered performance, shaping both individual and collective dynamics. Together, Jenny and Evilyn exemplify the complexities of internalized patriarchy: both women are entrapped by their unacknowledged histories, perform roles that obscure trauma, and replicate the silencing mechanisms that once oppressed them. Their social behaviors—borrowing but never returning, overpromising but never delivering—represent microcosms of broader feminist failures when women silence each other rather than fostering solidarity.
Autoethnographic Storytelling as Feminist Intervention and Counter-Narrative Strategy
My own trajectory demonstrates the potential for autoethnography and storytelling to counteract internalized sexism. By telling stories of social responsibilities in films, essays, performances, and curations, for example, I have reclaimed agency and narrative authority that were once denied to my family. Storytelling functions as both personal healing and feminist praxis. It allows for the articulation of trauma, validates lived experience, and models alternative pathways to empowerment. Where Jenny and Evilyn deferred to socially prescribed roles, I enacted a feminist, creative vision. My use of film and media disrupts patriarchal expectations: the domestic, passive, compliant woman is replaced with an active, visible, and self-authoring agent. In doing so, I honor my mother’s unrealized aspirations and continue a lineage of intergenerational feminist intervention.
Contrasting the silences of Jenny and Evilyn, I voice social justice issues as an independent curator, filmmaker, non-union actress, and writer. Where they promised but failed and borrowed stories like a stolen land, I aim to produce my own narrative. Storytelling has served both as emotional labour and scholarly praxis—an autoethnographic intervention in contested spaces that are not free from invasion. Rather than perform roles of perfection, I refuse masks and embodied vulnerability. On camera and screen, I told stories of trauma, resilience, and transformation. The representation of embodied narratives became a method and medium for personal healing and feminist commentary, and also a way to observe divides of feminism. Feminist solidarity requires recognition of internalized sexism and the ways women can replicate silencing. Creative praxis—through writing, performing, and curating—provides further mechanisms for resistance and reclamation of voice. The political in the personal exists: each produced or curated film and essay stood against scripts of silencing and complicity. These creative acts become feminist disruptions—archives of authenticity, transparency, and solidarity. The interplay between lived experience and fictionalized case studies yields critical insights and restoration of lost contexts.
Storytelling, as an autoethnographic methodology, is one of the ways to enable both women and men, who are victims of patriarchy, to transform trauma into agency, to document injustice, and to publicly assert and archive narratives otherwise at risk of erasure. This is particularly relevant in contexts such as #MeToo, where intersectional analysis is required to ensure that marginalized voices are not overshadowed by the amplification of more privileged experiences. By documenting both personal and collective experiences, storytelling acts as both evidence and intervention, subverting patriarchal norms that rely on women’s silence and performative compliance. Autoethnography and creative media enable resistance: storytelling, particularly personal narratives or journalistic observations in film, performance, or writing, allows feminist authors to reclaim voice. Such creative praxis can disrupt patriarchal scripts by centering the embodied and emotional truths of women’s lived experiences. Vignettes such as Jenny and Evilyn reveal that internalized oppression is not monolithic; it manifests differently based on history, privilege, and access to resources. Recognizing these subtleties is essential for fostering accountability and solidarity among women, particularly in feminist scholarship and activism.
Conclusion
As a feminist scholar, filmmaker, and performing artist, my observations demonstrate that reclaiming voice is neither linear nor confined to individual achievement. Familial abuse, intimate partner harassment, and internalized sexism, among other violence, imposed complex patterns of silencing; yet creative production allows us to author our own narrative and model alternative forms of feminist agency. Jenny and Evilyn illustrate the dangers of internalized patriarchy—how unhealed trauma, performative roles, and deception can perpetuate the very systems of oppression they once suffered. They illustrate how internalized sexism and patriarchal performance among women can sustain silencing under feminist signifiers. Their behaviors of disappearance—borrowing without return, promising without enacting—are micro-dynamics of oppression that impede solidarity. Feminist praxis must recognize and analyze such internal patterns that lead to external injustices. Autoethnographic storytelling—informed by practice, theory, and personal reflection—offers an ethical path forward. By authoring truth through creative media, women can reclaim voice, disrupt silence, and nurture connective, generative solidarity. Such praxis aligns with calls for intersectionality and non-elitist feminist discourses. The resilience of feminist movements depends not just on exposing external oppressions but on transforming internal performances that undermine collective liberation. Autoethnographic storytelling bridges theory and lived experience, providing frameworks for reflection, empowerment, and collective action. By confronting both external and internal silencing, women can reclaim autonomy and foster solidarity. The work of feminist praxis requires not only resistance to male oppression but also an honest reckoning with the subtler forces of female complicity and an enabling of authentic voice and intergenerational empowerment.
References
- Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press.
- Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge.
- Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press.
- Feminism in India. “How I Overcame My Trauma and Found My Voice.” 2019.
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