Date of Award

2017

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in English

Department

English

First Advisor

Lardner, Ted

Subject Headings

Composition, Gender Studies, Rhetoric, Womens Studies

Abstract

As a first-time student in a creative writing course and a long-time instructor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, I see possible paths that instructors in both fields could take in order to integrate creative writing and feminist pedagogy in ways that might increase students’ desire to write and to share their writing while at the same time helping students undertake feminist analyses. In the creative nonfiction writing class I took with Professor Lardner in the fall of 2015, I saw how many students (myself included) were writing about transformative personal experiences, but in this class, we never discussed these experiences as such. Instead of letting the content of the students’ writing take the shape of the elephant in the room, using a feminist lens of inquiry to examine these experiences via the content of the students’ writing would, I argue, benefit the creative writing classroom. I believe this feminist-informed approach can be the kind that helps students understand their environments, their perspectives, their positionalities, ultimately themselves, better.

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