Abstract
This anthology is an invaluable resource for those seeking a deeper meaning to the realities that characterize and affect women’s embodied selves as they explore paths to literacy, learning, and transformation. The collection contains particular significance for professionals and students of adult education, adult literacy, women and gender studies, and related fields. The editors adopt a unique, novel but ambitious approach to record women’s narratives (research essays, poems, reflections, and art), some of which are quite brief but documenting different dilemmas, self-examination, trials, acknowledgement of shared experiences, development of competencies, and ushering in new perspectives on women’s bodies. This is achieved in four distinct but related sections represented by numerical and directional symbolism that depicts the physical, mental, spiritual, and affective domains. The authors’ narratives share women’s conversations through which they overcome a past fraught with a range of emotions and entrenched cultural values that arrest their liberation and paths to success. These impediments that are cited in the home, the beauty shop, the community, foreign countries, or in the academy are unfortunate and sad; however, by recording their stories about the structures that influence their choices and actions and reflecting on their cultural and contextual experiences, many are finding pathways to a heightened sense of wholeness and wellness.
Our Stories, Ourselves: The EmBODYment of Women’s Learning in Literacy captures the essence of gender and the woman’s body in all its configurations. As the woman’s body is caught between the boundaries of domesticity and industry, so is her effort to unbind the ties that restrain her and be replenished by cycles of creation and renewal embodied in the evolving context of environmental, spiritual, and life-nourishing experiences. While some of the narratives unpack compromising and irrational interpretations of women’s sexuality, and other age-old societal constraints that deny gender equality and literacy advancement of women, others embrace theories of resistance. Narratives of protest are revealed in songs of praise for solidarity efforts to overcome the forces that oppress women universally. However, the full meaning of the message is sometimes shadowed by the brevity of some of the texts. The 25 contributors represent a generational cross-section of culture, race, cosmopolitan status, profession, and sexual orientation that is focused on the lived experiences constituting a subtext to well-being and wellness. The texts present a significant lesson for adult learners.
This book is ideal for courses in women’s studies, sociology, social work, and adult education for several reasons. First, it uncovers the complexity and centrality of literacy and the specific literacy experiences of women in everyday life by exposing their truths in appealing ways. Second, it presents a problematic for readers with some instructive vignettes such as Miller’s “Building a Labyrinth,” Gumbs’s “Beauty Shop Literacies,” Doerner’s “Women’s Problems: Hysterectomy,” and Schwartz’s “Coming Out to Students.” Third, these various experiential exercises not only invite the reader to further this domain of inquiry but also to reflect on the continuing evolution of women’s status and identity in the world today. The anthology allows the reader to review the transformations and new developments that foster innovation in literacy education and its intersection with women’s studies by adding to the platform of knowledge on the expanded bases of women’s intellectual thought and practice. She will treasure the significant lessons derived from this collective discourse and how they will help her understand and transform herself and those around her.