The Right to Represent: Women’s Struggle for Voice and Self-Expression

For centuries, women’s lives were written about, not written by them. Their pain, joy, and everyday struggles reached the page filtered through someone else’s imagination, usually a man’s. The right to represent asks a simple but radical question: who gets to tell a woman’s story, and does it matter if she tells it herself? In gender studies, this question sits at the heart of how we read literature, watch films, and even consume the news.

Why representation is a matter of power, not just visibility 🔗

Representation is not a cosmetic issue. It decides who gets heard when decisions are made, whose experiences are treated as “normal,” and whose problems get funded, studied, and legislated. When women narrate their own experiences, they are not just adding variety to bookshelves. They are claiming a share of interpretive power that has historically belonged to men.

Voice and agency are now recognised as prerequisites for equality, not just its outcome. UN Women’s own framework treats a woman’s freedom to speak and be heard as inseparable from her ability to sit at the table where decisions are made, whether that table is a parliament, a newsroom, or a village council. This is not an abstract idea. Research on local governance in India found that panchayats led by women commissioned 62 percent more drinking water projects than those led by men, because women’s councils prioritised concerns that male-led bodies had historically overlooked. Representation, in other words, changes outcomes. It is not decorative.

When women write their own stories 🔗

Literature has long been one of the few spaces where women could reclaim narrative control, even when society denied them control elsewhere. This is the foundation of what the scholar Elaine Showalter called gynocriticism, a mode of criticism that treats women as the producers of meaning rather than merely its subjects. Instead of asking how women are depicted in texts written by men, gynocriticism asks what it looks like when women write from the inside of their own experience, using their own language, rhythms, and silences to describe a world men have rarely had to notice up close, as theorists tracing this school of thought have long argued.

Sara Aboobacker and the story only a woman could tell 🔗

The Kannada writer Sara Aboobacker spent her career writing about Muslim women’s lives in the Kasaragod region, often confronting patriarchal norms within her own community with unusual directness. Her short story “The Birth” is a small but powerful example of the right to represent in action. The story follows Khatija through the unbearable pain of childbirth, focusing not on the event as a medical or social milestone but on her private, physical suffering: her effort to hold back her screams, and her dread that the neighbours might hear her cries and judge her for them.

This is not a scene a male writer is likely to imagine with the same texture, because it is not built from observation but from lived, bodily memory. Khatija’s fear of being heard, rather than simply her physical pain, is the detail that only a firsthand female perspective tends to surface. It reframes childbirth not as a joyous, universally celebrated event, but as something a woman may have to endure while performing composure for the people around her. That performance of privacy in the middle of agony is itself a comment on how much of women’s pain is expected to stay silent.

What gets lost when women are absent from the narrative 🔗

The flip side of self-representation is the cost of its absence. When women are not telling their own stories, in fiction or in fact, entire categories of experience simply do not make it into the public record. This shows up clearly in how news media treats women even today.

The numbers behind the silence 🔗

The Global Media Monitoring Project, the longest-running study of gender in news media, has tracked this gap since 1995. Its most recent global findings show women still make up roughly one in four people seen, heard, or read about in the news, despite being half the population. India’s own numbers are worse than the global average. Coordinated locally by the Network of Women in Media, the project found that women’s presence as news subjects and sources in India actually fell from 22 percent in 2010 to just 14 percent in 2020. Fewer women reporters were assigned stories, and expert commentary remained overwhelmingly male. The public conversation, in effect, kept happening largely without women in the room, even as stories affecting women continued to be reported.

Silence around the body 🔗

The same pattern of missing voice shows up around women’s health experiences, echoing the very silence Aboobacker wrote about in fiction. A study examining childbirth experiences among women in Bihar used an arts-based method to help participants describe respectful and disrespectful care, because many women found it difficult to voice these experiences directly given the sensitivity of the subject in a patriarchal setting. The researchers documented accounts of unconsented medical procedures, lack of privacy, and verbal or physical mistreatment during labour, much of which had gone unspoken until participants were given a structured, safe way to narrate it. Fiction anticipated what research would later confirm: women’s bodily experiences carry a stigma that keeps them hidden, and creating a space for women to represent that experience themselves is often the first step to changing it.

Reading representation with both eyes open 🔗

None of this means only women should write about women, or that men’s portrayals of female characters are automatically suspect. It means gender studies asks us to read critically in both directions: to notice what a story reveals when a woman tells it from the inside, and to notice what might be missing, exaggerated, or assumed when the same story is told from the outside. Comparing how the same theme, say pain, motherhood, or ambition, is handled by writers of different genders is a useful classroom exercise precisely because the differences are often instructive rather than accusatory.

This comparative reading matters for a very practical reason. Patriarchal structures do not usually maintain themselves through deliberate malice. They persist through omission: stories not told, experiences not asked about, pain assumed rather than described. Aboobacker’s Khatija, silent in her suffering, is a literary stand-in for millions of women whose distress has historically gone unrecorded simply because no one thought to ask, or because women themselves were discouraged from telling. The right to represent is ultimately the right to be part of the record at all.

What do you think? 🔗

What do you think? Can you think of an experience in your own life, or in someone close to you, that you feel could only be authentically described by someone who has lived it firsthand? And when you read fiction or watch films portraying women’s lives, do you find yourself asking who is telling the story, or does the story usually speak for itself?

References

1. https://www.unwomen.org/en/un-women-strategic-plan-2022-2025/voice-agency-and-leadership
2. https://knowledge.unwomen.org/en/articles/facts-and-figures/facts-and-figures-womens-leadership-and-political-participation
3. https://literariness.org/2016/09/25/gynocriticism-a-brief-note/
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sara_Aboobacker
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Media_Monitoring_Project
6. https://www.changeincontent.com/women-in-news-gmmp-2025/
7. https://nwmindia.org/initiatives/its-time-to-end-denial-about-under-representation-of-women-in-indian-media/
8. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9009281/