I'm supposed to be blogging about sexism, but honestly I'm too busy trying to make a school deadline to be very creative. Instead, here's a quote that I came across while researching for my critical thesis that I wish I had written, and we'll call my poor, queer, female self's participation in graduate school as my contribution to the cause instead.
I am the only member of my family to live an adulthood clear and free from violence in my own home. Significantly, I am also the only member of my family to have obtained a college education. I believe being a reader saved my life, for it was often even the simplest of stories that I discovered, and was henceforth able to imagine, spaces free from violence. Stories, more specifically counter-narratives, gave language to what was yet unspoken and provided an illustration of how I might begin to narrate my own experiences. To evolve from the kind of family history that makes for statistics of the culturally abject at best (and the socially dead at worst) required that I acquire new languages for navigating the world. Through the paths of recognition and revelation embedded within, stories introduced the tools necessary for me to begin emotionally and physically navigating my way through those worlds, like my childhood home, horribly saturated by violence. [Lopez, Tiffany Ana. “Critical witnessing in Latina/o and African American Prison Narratives.” p.62-77 in Prose and Cons, D. Quentin Miller, ed.]
Also, Prose and Cons is the frickin' cleverest name ever for a book about prison literature.
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