My favorite text that we read this quarter was Keene’s Counternarratives. Carmel’s story, which is presented as merely a footnote in a text about an abstracted, male-dominated history about Catholics in early America, taught me to look for silences in the text. It demonstrated that I need to pay attention to who is not speaking when reading about history, especially as it relates to women, people of color or other groups that face oppression. I thought the duality in the text between Eugenie and Carmel was also fascinating, as it showed that sometimes, people who face some sort of repression or oppression, like Eugenie, can turn around and also be oppressive and silencing to others. I think this text also taught me that binaries that we can construct – like those who silence and those are silenced – are far more nuanced. Above all, Keene’s work taught me that social change can be created when you write to fill in the gaps in history and give a voice or even simply pay attention to those who were silenced. It’s too easy to assume that if there is no extant writing or documents about someone, then it’s like he or she never existed and that he or she has no impact on our lives today. Keene shows us that that is wrong. Even though he gives a fictitious account of a woman named Carmel, he is reminding us that there are thousands of people who are not in the history books but who lived and breathed and mattered, and they too deserve to have their stories told.

Question: Is it ethical to write from a perspective other than your own when writing for social change? An example would be a man writing from a woman’s perspective or vice versa – with the exception of satire, should one only write one’s own perspective, as doing otherwise would be making assumptions/writing without the lived experience?