Literacy as Power and Its Impacts on Women’s Empowerment in Kathryn Stockett’s The Help
Abstract
This study reveals how literacy operates as a form of power and its impact on woman’s empowerment in Kathryn Stockett The Help (2009) using New Literacy Studies (Street, 1984; Barton & Hamilton, 1998), literacy as power theory (Williams & Zengers, 2007), and Kabeer’s (1999) women’s empowerment framework. Through qualitative textual analysis, it identifies three key literacy events—initiation of the book, the writing process, and the book’s publication—where literacy functions via control over meaning, action production, and strategicity. The findings show that literacy enables marginalized Black women to challenge dominant racial narratives, negotiate risk, and produce tangible social consequences, despite structural constraints. Applying Kabeer’s framework reveals that literacy acts as a resource that facilitates agency and leads to partial yet meaningful achievements, including economic independence and psychological transformation.
Keywords
References
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.31004/jele.v11i3.2417
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