Literacy Beyond the Single Story

Abstract

This chapter examines two interrelated topics: the class-based disconnect between US medical students and the majority of patients in their care as they learn medicine; and the prevailing cultural mood that people can overcome most obstacles and improve their lives by sheer force of individual will. To interrogate this perception, the chapter focuses on the lived experiences of Claireece “Precious” Jones in Lee Daniels’s film Precious (2009). The film illustrates the complicated ways that class intersects with gender, race, literacy, and health and that defies “single-story” thinking. The chapter offers strategies and exercises for analyzing the film and how they can be incorporated in the classroom in order to illuminate these intersections and to enable students to recognize the structural causes of poverty.