Gender, Language and the Politics of Literacy

Abstract The ways in which literacy has been conceptualised as power in discourses of power are critiqued and contrasted with the experience of Hispanic immigrant women. The politics of language are seen as central to the politics of literacy; both of these are looked at from the standpoint of how women ‘live’ them in their everyday lives. Because it is caught up in the power dynamic between men and women, literacy is ‘lived’ as women's work but not as women's right; women yearn to become ‘literate’, to go to school, but are confined to the home.