“I’m Not a Feminist”: How Narratives of the Rural Shape Self

• In Event: Critical Considerations of Space and Place: Rural Student Experiences and Higher Education Opportunities

Abstract

Speaker 2 uses critical methodologies to interrupt the dominant narrative of privilege in higher education. As a white woman from rural communities in the Midwest and Southcentral US, she analyzes her own experience to confront the patriarchal and oppressive narratives facing women in similar communities. She utilizes critical autoethnography to explore the normative views of women and whiteness often presented in the discourse surrounding rural communities. Critical autoethnography allows for exploration and examination not only of intersections of identity related to race, gender and place, but also understanding of how power inflects and infuses experiences of learning and education for white women in rural communities in the US (Pennington & Brock, 2012).

Speaker 2’s autoethnographic narrative uncovers how, although the rural US is largely framed by dominant popular narratives as a monolithic and history-less white mass, such a narrative hides complicated family and community histories of racial migration and class privilege. Using definitions of feminism as a way into stories of self and social context (Reed-Danahay, 1997), Speaker 2 identifies and explores how women’s identities and ideas of feminism are formed and affected by discourses of “the rural” as well as local and regional discourses.

Author

• Erin Simpson, University of Oklahoma