Reading as a Woman: The Effects of Gender and Race Marginalization within Literature on the Dynamic Between Reader and Text

Reading as a Woman: The Effects of Gender and Race Marginalization within Literature on the Dynamic Between Reader and Text


WOMAN

It is being somewhat like a well.
When you drop a well bucket
you will find
restlessness deep in the well...

That she is herself
is more difficult than water is water
just as it’s difficult for water to go beyond water
she and I are linked in mutual love
who once betrayed each other
two mirrors who reflected each other

When I escape from her, I incessantly
am forced to be her and when I confront her
instead I become him...

Kora Kumiko1



Writing is communication. It is the telling of life, sometimes factual accounts, sometimes fictitious, metaphoric. It is the stringing together of words to recreate images, to recreate feelings, that mirror the real world in which we live and experience. Words contain power to which we have become bound, in the desperate seeking of truth and meaning. There is a searc...