Glass Slippers and the Power of Transformative Storytelling

Abstract

I set out to write a poetry chapbook that perhaps included an essay or two tying the poems together in a way that only prose can. I wanted to explore sex: the lessons we learn about it, the euphemisms we use for it, the ways we express it, and the discussions we don’t have about it. This topic explored the questions I have used to navigate both my English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality (WGS) degrees. Poetry felt like the appropriate way to navigate these questions by softening the immediacy of talking about sex through form and metaphors while still having those “difficult” conversations. What I ended up with, however, is a collection of four essays and five poems. These pieces hardly talk about sex at all, but they do begin to navigate the waters I have failed to cross within my own circle of family and friends. Glass Slippers and the Power of Transformative Storytelling begins to unveil the things we teach women through media and culture. Most of the time, these are subtle lessons, but other times they’re blatant and intrusive. As educated human beings living with injustice, we generally understand that these lessons exist and that they have very real and violent implications. But we choose complacency. I’m guilty of this as much as you, dear reader. Complacency is easy. It’s comfortable. It’s less work. We risk our safety or our reputation or our sense of place when we question things. If I’ve learned anything during my undergraduate degree, though, it’s that these comfortabilities aren’t serving even the most privileged among us. Instead of confronting and centering sex in Glass Slippers and the Power of Transformative Storytelling, I have confronted my childhood filled with fairy tale ideas of both codependent marriages and absolute independence. As you’ll soon find, I don’t have a dramatic story to share. Glass Slippers and the Power of Transformative Storytelling isn’t a collection of answers to a series of questions. It’s a catalogue of more questions. The goal of this project wasn’t to find answers but to encourage you to think about the questions too.