ABSTRACT
In this chapter we weave autobiographical poetic and arts-based narratives of the pain and healing of being silenced as women in educational places. Gaudet refers to her identity journey as “dismantling the patriarchy”; we, too, find ourselves navigating our identity as women scholars within education’s dominant heteropatriarchal stories. We engage in artful ways that honour our voices as women while evoking understanding between two scholars: one Indigenous and one non-Indigenous. Lorde asked us as women, “What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say?” for silence often overshadows our voices. As a way to (un)silence our voices, we use poetic inquiry, which Falkner and Cloud described as a form of voicing “political action, response, and reflective practice.” As we unravel the complexities of our experiences as women in the academy, we are attending to the voicing of self. Lorde asks us to “pay attention to those voices we have been taught to distrust, that we articulate what they teach us, that we act upon what we know.” In this work, we maintain a forward-looking orientation, knowing that through our resilience, resurgence, and relationality as women scholars, we are co-composing poetic narratives of possibility.
