Writing is a powerful tool through which feminist ideas are created and shared with broad audiences. Throughout the spring of 2024, I worked with Dr. Julie Shayne, a professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington Bothell campus, and around 20 of my peers to expand my understanding of what feminist writing means, how it influences the world around us, and how I too could be a feminist writer.
Dr. Shayne pushed me to expand my understanding of feminist writing in a variety of ways exhibited in this portfolio. One way in which her class helped me to stretch my understanding of feminist writing was through journal entries, which allowed me to sit with and process the works we read for the class. Every week our class would read different styles of feminist writing that helped us understand its power in some way. These readings would be followed by “Reflective Journals” completed once a fortnight which provided space to process some aspect of the writing. The first journal entry prompted us to write about our understanding of what feminist writing meant and why it was important; the following three had us think about how the intended audience, the pieces’ goals, and the voices being represented influenced the pieces we read; the final entry asked us to reflect on the memoir we had read in a small group with classmates and discuss what made the memoir a feminist text.
A second way my understanding of feminist writing was expanded in this course was through workshops run by feminists who had carved paths for themselves with different types of feminist writing. These workshops encompassed seven topics; promoting social causes through movement journalism, sharing stories with an audience through playwriting, igniting change through activist writing, creating the stories you needed when you were younger by writing children’s books, expanding representation through fiction writing, amplifying voices through poetry, and telling your own story with a memoir. The experts who came in to lead these workshops provided valuable insights into how feminist writing can look different for everyone, how to create powerful pieces in genres you don’t usually write in, and why their genre was a powerful vehicle for producing and sharing feminist knowledge.
The final way in which my understanding of feminist writing was expanded which is demonstrated in this portfolio was through the creation of three revised pieces based on the workshops. The three workshops I chose to expand on were the activist writing workshop, the poetry workshop, and the memoir workshop.
My first revised piece, inspired by the workshop on activist writing, is the UWB Labor Colloquium Solidarity Statement, this piece, which I wrote after reading the solidarity statements for Stefany Greer’s workshop on activist writing, was written for my work with the Bothell campus’s labor center. The piece was written in response to UAW 4121’s strike authorization to express the colloquium’s support of their demands for living wages and affordable healthcare. Through the creation and publication of this piece, I and the colloquium that supported and released this piece, were challenging oppressive institutions and working to amplify the voices of students whom the University was actively trying to silence.
My second revised piece, Last I Saw You, was a poem written after our poetry workshop with Claudia Castro Luna. I chose to write a poem as a challenge to help me expand the genres in which I am comfortable writing. Before reading Luna’s book and attending her workshop, I believed poetry was an elusive genre reserved for the finest. While Luna is absolutely “the finest,” reading her poems and listening to her teach about how we too could be poets inspired me to experiment with this genre which I hadn’t touched since childhood. The piece provides a physical and emotional description of watching my mother die from cancer as a teenager. While grief is often written about in poetry, experiences with pre-mature death still seem to be quite taboo. Losing a parent young is an extraordinarily isolating experience and I hoped through writing this poem I could help to normalize this experience.
My final piece, simply titled An Excerpt from Chapter Four, was written after our workshop on memoir writing with Sarah Cannon. The excerpt from my hypothetical memoir explores the sexual violence I experienced at the hands of a classmate during my freshman year of high school. In the piece, which is an extremely abridged version of what I would write for a full-length memoir, I discuss what it felt like to slowly lose autonomy over my body, how existing in a place where I was constantly threatened with serious bodily harm eroded at my mental and physical health. While this story is not a happy one, verbalizing it was empowering. It provided a sense of ownership over a time in my life that for so long felt like it belonged to everyone except me.
I hope through reading this portfolio, whoever may stumble upon this page can gain a more complete understanding of the importance of feminist writing and see how feminist writing can be used to empower and create change.