The Spy Girls and the Quest for “Forbidden” Literacy: Rural Chinese Girls’ Negotiation of “No Christmas” School Policy Through Subversive Literacy Practices

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article is a critical ethnographic study that examines rural Chinese girls’ literacy practices in sanctioned and unsanctioned spaces, and their negotiations with the articulated and delivered literacy program. In particular, this study focuses on a group of 1st-grade girls, who I call the “Spy Girls,” engaged in the celebration of Christmas, and their interactions with unauthorized literacy practices or “forbidden literacy” that challenge the institutional and structural discourse in relation to gender and school policies. Using a feminist lens, I argue that although local governments have deemed celebrating Christmas to be a compromise of tradition and unpatriotic, the girls’ practices exemplified the ways they negotiate gender roles and construct literate identities through appropriating acceptable forms of literacy expression to communicate under the radar.