Brains v. Brawn: Classed and Racialized Masculinity in Literacy Narratives

A feminist reading of four prominent literacy narratives—Mike Rose’s Lives on the Boundary, Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory, Victor Villanueva’s Bootstraps, and Keith Gilyard’s Voices of the Self—shows that conflicts and anxieties about the consequences of schooling on working-class masculinity animate these texts. Each of these writers experiences, manages, and ultimately resolves, to greater or lesser degrees, his conflicts over masculinity, at least textually speaking, and does so, moreover, in ways that are linked to his views on literacy and education.