Critical literacy, feminism, and a politics of representation

For a multicultural democratic society to thrive, any discourse about literacy needs to acknowledge the multiplicity of voices that engulfs us. Yet, if we aspire to a goal of developing a critical citizenry, whose actions are informed by democratic principles of justice that address issues of oppression and discrimination and allow for the creation of multiple spaces where hope is shared, we need a view of literacy that provides a language for naming and transforming the ideological positions and social conditions that obstruct these possibilities.1 In other words, it needs to address the question of social usage, which suggests at least three forms of literacy: functional, cultural and critical. In this case, literacy would be linked to developing particular skills and knowledge that offer students a range of subject positions that would be necessary for realizing democratic public life. For example, beyond functional literacy, people need forms of literacy that provide multiple languages that allow communication across lines of cultural difference. They also need modes of critical literacy that challenge the idea of identity as singular, autonomous, and uniform; that is, a mode of critical and cultural literacy that provides the pedagogical conditions for understanding how identities are constructed through different subject positions, how literacy as a critical and cultural discourse functions in this case as a form of enunciation or address, and a location from which expression and action proceeds.