Rural Women, Creative Writing, and Resistance

Abstract

Blending narrative portraiture and feminist methods, this study explored the lives of two rural women who are creative writers. The study asked (1) What are their critical purposes? and (2) How did gender and place intersect in their writing lives? The findings were that the women used creative writing to engage in praxis by creating and disseminating knowledge. Their writing critically interrogated and redefined conceptions of womanhood. Additional critical purposes were unique to women's intersectional identities and lived experiences. They ranged from interrogating societal perspectives of gender, sexuality, and race to interrogating rurality and sexual violence. The aesthetic texts they created articulated and advocated for intersubjective truths. Shifting the focus of critical literacy from pedagogy and reading to writing beyond educational spaces, the women drew upon critical literacy not as a means of being taught how to understand the power of texts, but to wield the power of texts themselves.