Literacies of Distinction: (Dis)Empowerment in Social Movements

Abstract

Social movements often organise activities around the use of written forms. Yet these literacy events and practices have received little attention for the roles they play in effecting social, cultural and political change. In this article we argue that literacy activities should be analysed for their centrality to the formation of new identities, for their inclusionary/exclusionary effects and for their power to imagine and evoke liberatory worlds. We apply these concepts to an ethnographic study of women's activism in Nepal in the early 1990s, a time when female students, preparing for the annual women's Tij festival, were first beginning to use their literacy skills to record the Tij songs they were creating and copying from newly available Tij songbooks. In our multi-year study of the festival, we found that these new literacy practices, especially their ties to the epistemology of the newly popular political songs, were inadvertently introducing a social distinction that empowered ‘educated’ women at the expense of their ‘uneducated’ sisters. Examination of this case illustrates processes of social division brought about by literacy practices and helps explain how contingent, historical developments, such as social movements, can powerfully shape the relationship between literacy and identity.