Open AccessThe Sacredness of Remembering and Re-storying
Author(s) -
Christina Romero-Ivanova
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
international journal of literacy, culture, and language education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2642-4002
DOI - 10.14434/ijlcle.v1i0.26974
Subject(s) - resistance (ecology) , viewpoints , qualitative research , space (punctuation) , psychology , gender studies , sociology , aesthetics , social psychology , social science , visual arts , art , ecology , linguistics , philosophy , biology
This article discusses findings from a qualitative research study which focused on how women from diverse backgrounds used storying as a space to make sense of life experiences that had highly impacted their lives. This article explores how women’s stories mediate their experiences of being temporarily silenced, how they resisted others’ silencing over their own viewpoints, and how their storying mediates different ways of “talking back” through story-writing in letters and journals and story-living through an intentional practice of wearing an artifact of trauma. Multiple interviews were used as the primary data sources, and through these the participants’ stories emerged. Intersections of gender, race, religion, and socioeconomic status in the participants’ stories were analyzed, and the categories of silencing, resistance/talking back, and resilience developed. Findings included the participants’ abilities to navigate issues related to others’ forced perspectives on their bodies as a social and political space (Pitts, 2003; Woods, 2012).