Literacy Matters Winter 2022

After 15-20 minutes of small group discussion, each group would take turns sharing a synthesis of their thinking, presenting lingering questions or key thoughts to the whole group for further discussion. My role during discussions was mostly silent beyond getting them started and keeping time. Students are capable of complex sense-making without the direct oversight of a content expert (Freire, 1970), and letting them lead is critical to moving them toward developing the agency to act against unjust conditions (Ivey & Johnston, 2013). This also served my needs by giving me more time to observe and take notes. Tim was one of 12 students who consented to participate in the research study. A 19-year-old White, cisgender, gay man from central Florida with a progressive and activist minded friend group, he came into the study with some basic knowledge about rape culture. Tim’s initial goal for the study was simply “to learn and be a better ally to victims.” He started by examining his own role in social systems that perpetuate sexual violence before turning his focus to disrupting his and others’ binary conceptions of rape culture. During the study of a text that centered heterosexual sexual violence, Tim was able to “queer” the implicit aims of the book study to explore and unpack his own complicity in rape culture, dissect concerning social mores in the LGBTQ+ community, and identify ways in which the #MeToo movement can better make space for LGBTQ+ victims and voices. The data presented here consists of field notes from book study group discussions and Tim’s journal entries. I recorded discussion notes in real-time because crosstalk made audio recording a challenge. To develop Tim’s narrative, I employed aspects of qualitative narrative inquiry, using Ricoeur’s (2016) hermeneutic methods to glean experiential insights and cycling analytically between my interpretations and critical literacy theory. In this way, I was able to align Tim’s actions and shared thoughts with his personal and cultural resources that elicited a unique perspective about the text, topics, and his sense making. Narrative inquiry’s ability to “critique cultural discourses, institutions, organizations, and interactions that produce social inequalities” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2017, p. 430) seemed appropriate. I do not claim that Tim is representative of the outcomes of the book study or the experience of other participants. Tim’s experience is unique to his collective life experiences, and the story that follows is best viewed through that lens. Positionality Statement As a white, cishet, middle-class, able adult woman, I recognize that I am not an expert in oppression or erasure. More often, I am the oppressor, the eraser. I must always be learning and unlearning that privilege and power. I am also an educator, a profession that continues to enact a legacy of harm. I believe it is my obligation to critique the structural violence that curriculum and educational spaces perpetuate and attempt to redistribute power and center marginalized voices. However, as this study aptly demonstrates, it remains “difficult for radical teachers to resist the oppressive practices built into their teaching” (Lalik & Oliver, 2007, p. 63).

Court bench—and the resurgence of Tarana Burke’s “Me Too” or #MeToo brought conversations about rape culture to the forefront of public and scholarly discussions (Garcia, 2017; Tolentino, 2018). I proposed this book study as an opportunity for students to read about and discuss sexual violence beyond singular definitions and statistics to explore the deeper sociopolitical issues that maintain systems that perpetuate sexual violence. Study Context The group read Amy Reed’s YA novel, The Nowhere Girls (2017). New to town, white high schooler Grace unknowingly moves into a house formerly occupied by Lucy, a girl run out of town for accusing a group of popular high school boys of gang rape. Grace’s curiosity is piqued by Lucy’s story. It leads her to connect with two other students: Rosina Suarez, a Mexican American lesbian punk rocker, and Erin DeLillo, a white autistic girl dealing with her own sexual trauma. Together, they rally the girls at their high school to protest the rape culture in their school and community, including boycotting sex of any kind with male students. I selected this text because, of all the texts I reviewed at the time, it presented the widest range of perspectives and experiences and made some effort to explore how intersectional issues like race, ability, and sexuality impact sexual violence. As the story unfolds, the novel disrupts commonplace thinking by positing that sexual violence is frequent and the result of cultural norms that celebrate dominance. It provides a multiplicity of character voices who have varying and often conflicting perspectives and opinions about sexual assault, particularly regarding how it connects to social norms related to gender and sexuality. As the protagonists are repeatedly rebuffed in their attempts to seek justice for Lucy and other victims, the text illuminates how social and political factors influence people’s decisions and lives and how unequal power relationships reify rape culture. Additionally, the protagonists’ varied experiences trying to change the culture in their high school demonstrate multiple examples of taking action to change unjust conditions. However, as I will discuss later in the article, while one of the three protagonists is queer, the novel failed to deliver on LGBTQ+ perspectives in relation to rape culture and the #MeToo movement. students across the campus. The book study was capped at 15 students, and all were invited to participate in the research study. Every Thursday at 3:00 pm, I met with 15 students from a wide variety of majors to discuss the novel, tell stories, and share perspectives. Meetings were scheduled to last an hour but sometimes ran a few minutes longer. The average meeting began with me greeting the group and asking them how they were doing since I last saw them. After a few minutes of chatting, students would split into self-made small groups of 3-5 based on common threads that ran through the things they were thinking about and wanted to discuss. Journaling between group meetings was encouraged to reflect on and respond to their reading, and students often drew on their journal entries to identify what they wished to discuss. This study took place at a large public university in the southeast United States and was made available to undergraduate

Literacy Matters General Articles

| 16 | Literacy Matters | Volume 22 • Winter 2022

CLICK HERE TO RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS