Resisting Through Relation: A Bowenian Family Systems Analysis of Emotional Agency in Haifaa Al-Mansour’s Wadjda

Middle Eastern cinema has received increasing attention in academia for its cultural and gendered narratives, but family systems' emotional architecture in such films has received little attention. Filling this gap in the literature, this research applies Murray Bowen’s Family Systems Theory to examine intergenerational emotional processes in Wadjda (2012), the first feature film by a Saudi woman. In this study, I utilized qualitative, doctrinal methodology and applied deductive scene-based codes from Bowen’s eight constructs, which focused primarily on emotional differentiation, triangulation, projection, and societal emotional process. Findings suggest Wadjda’s resistance extends beyond a symbolic or superficial act of defiance, whereby she is able navigate maternal fusion, paternal absence, and societal constraints through her emotional processes associated with features of agency, autonomy and relational clarity. In social and familial systems, her portrait of agency exemplified systemically embedded agency that serves as a form of supported emotion-regulated defiance. By drawing on cultural and feminist film analysis with Bowen’s clinical theory, I challenged traditional perceptions of social family systems, providing a different lens to view emotionally supportive family systems as active sites of gendered negotiation. The contribution from this study extends family systems theory beyond a therapeutic sense, offering another approach to understand how emotionally enabled dynamics provide resistance in patriarchal societies. Specifically, it became apparent that depictions of agency in patriarchal cultures through an emotional systems framework may provide a deeper analysis of resistance than only through a symbolic critique.