Women as Creative Writers: Leveraging the Aesthetic and the Critical for Activism

• In Event: Poetic, Theatrical, Creative, and Critical Literacies

Abstract

This qualitative study, grounded in feminist methodologies (Sprague, 2016), documented how six women used their creative writing as tool to leverage aesthetic and critical dimensions in the activist texts (Kynard, 2011). Findings documented that participants leveraged the aesthetic and the critical as they composed activist texts by using craft techniques to build counter stories, to witness intersectional experiences of oppression, and to de-pathologizing societal stereotypes and prejudices regarding gender, mental health, rurality, sexuality, and race.

Author

• Honor B. McElroy, Salisbury University