Journal Entry #4

Feminist writing allows for those usually unheard to use their voices and encourages those not listening to hear. Further, it is a space for internal discovery and external change in which community can be fostered through shared experience and conjoined efforts to dismantle preexisting discriminatory structures of government and culture. It is in writing, reading, and sharing these texts that ideas are spread and the “silenced” become loud.

The novel This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel is one such story that serves purposes far beyond entertainment. This novel explores the experiences of a family of seven as they navigate the endeavor of raising a transgender child, the lines that keep gender binary blurring along the way. Everything that feels intrinsic about gender becomes less so as the parents, Rosie and Penn, try to keep Poppy safe as she transitions socially to female. As a story written by a parent with a transgender daughter, the novel does not shy away from the ugly reality of what it’s like to be trans, especially in a devastating scene when Rosie witnesses the death of a trans woman, caused by transphobic violence (Frankel 104-111). It also, however, lets us witness trans joy when it is given the space to exist. These are stories that are rarely, if ever, told in fiction, and fiction’s unique ability to evoke intense emotion in the reader gives the novel the power to sway them, potentially to the side of empathy and understanding of what trans kids and adults go through. Because these stories are so rarely highlighted, misinformation about being transgender, and especially trans youth, is widespread and more readily accessible than actual truth. In an ironic way, viewing our reality through the filtered lens of fiction allows it to come to life in a way that, sometimes, statistics or news articles fail to capture. Frankel explore in great depth the experiences of this family and how gender is made confusing and complex, not because of anything Poppy herself does or feels, but because of how people react and force expectations on her, even from within her family. It makes a stark contrast to the stories that usually get spread about trans kids. By taking control of that narrative and repackaging it in the form of art, of fiction writing, they are given a new life through which individuals can recognize the stories of transgender lives not as a distant possibility, but as a potentially deeply relatable reality.

In addition to fiction writing, poetry is an art form that is deeply versatile and has been used for millennia within religion, history, storytelling, and activism. The poetry collection Killing Marías: A Poem for Multiple Voices by Claudia Castro Luna is a heartbreaking example of how poetry can be utilized to make statements within politics against societal bias. The poems in this collection are all addressed to Latina women named María who were murdered in Ciudad Juárez. The poems explore this central theme of femicide and its brutality. In a series of short but impactful words and phrases, Luna shapes the suffering of these women into concrete, irrefutable certainties that cannot truly be made beautiful even by poetry. “Let us remember / on this and every day / however compelling / words are not flesh / figurative language / life does not replace” (Luna 45). The voices of these women were literally silenced when their lives were abused and taken, and in putting their pain to paper, Luna keeps them from being drowned out or forgotten. These women who were made into little more than another number in a statistic instead are presented as people who did not deserve what was done to them. Poetry is a form of writing that is adept at communicating emotion and pain succinctly and using it for this purpose is historically apt and extremely powerful as an artistic exhibition of feminism. However, the poems are about more than pain. Luna uses the beauty of the written word to create in the face of violence, an act that is affirming and compelling in and of itself. She calls for change, in the hearts of readers and thereby within their communities and actions, writing, “but working women / are thinking women / and feeling women / with mouths to feed / with dreams to seek / and life to love” (21). Captured in words, María is given a way to live on.

Feminism is about more than physical action. Protests and rallies in the streets have their valuable place in the sphere of activism, but it is in feminist writing that ideas are given shape and can spread from minds to communities to countries. When we write, and when we read, feminism becomes not just an idea or movement, but people who have been told to be quiet. With feminist writing, those who have been silenced can be spoken for, and, just as important, those who are being silenced presently can learn how to use their own voices.

Works Cited

Frankel, Laurie. This Is How It Always Is. Flatiron Books, 2017.

Luna, Claudio Castro. Killing Marías: A Poem for Multiple Voices. Two Sylvias Press, 2017.