Writing With Courage: Revealing Self in Community

• In Event: Roundtable Session 48
  In Roundtable Session: Writing and Literacies SIG Roundtable 6. Game On: Youth Participation and Identity in Video Games, Popular Literature, and Self-Expression

Abstract

Literacy is tied to heteronormative understandings of citizenship, personhood, and democracy. Writing that is critical, courageous, and communal invites students to resist heteronormative ways of being and challenge normalized ways of being literate. This study uses critical and queer pedagogical frameworks to examine how normalized views of literacy can be interrupted when students are invited to write the self,—that is, write in ways that positions personal experience at the center regardless of how those experiences compare to what is “normal” or “acceptable.” This study considers the narratives and other literacy artifacts of Black queer/questioning youth and queer allies of an afterschool writing club to illustrate how writing served as expressions of courage, for the purposes of healing and revealing.

Author

• Latrise Johnson, The University of Alabama