“Stigmata: A Memoir of Pain and Resistance,” by Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies Vivyan Adair, appears in the current issue of Feminist Studies.
The creative nonfiction piece describes the scorn and humiliation that comes with being an impoverished child growing up in a single-parent household, only to continue that life as an adult until finding education as a way to change it.
“In school I was supported and challenged by dedicated, able, and patient instructors who encouraged me to transform my life through the pathway of higher education,” Adair wrote.
With “other poor single mothers supporting each other and reading and rewriting our own lives and values, crafting and interpreting our stories together, in and out of the classroom…we learned to both embrace and push against mainstream knowledge that surrounded and indeed marked us—and from which we had most often been made absent by design.”