One day after the inauguration of Donald Trump, people around the word participated in an international women's march. The march was a site where people could raise awareness for any issues that impact women around the world. Whether the march succeeded or failed, it raised questions for those invested in coalitional politics: who profits from the labor of whom, who may be allowed to be representative of which issues, how is womanhood experienced differently at different intersections, and who is allowed to claim legitimate womanhood. It is especially timely to undertake scholarly research that attempts to think through these questions. This paper undertakes the question of coalition, especially in regards to how one looks for strategies to form coalitions across different(ly) marginalized identities. I engage with Cathy Cohen's "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?" (1997) as a structural framework for my readings of Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina (1992) and Sapphire's Push (1996). Reading these texts together offers us the opportunity to think about how to look for and draw lines of alliance across marginalized positions. I read the representations of abuse suffered by the protagonists as metaphorical for the ways girls and women are victims of institutional violence. I argue the girls form communities with queer women who become adoptive maternal figures, suggesting the need to look beyond the (inherently violent heteronormative patriarchal family for repair. Finally I argue that not only may we read these texts together, but in fact, we should and must read them together, as the shared reading constitutes a praxis of Cohen's theory, forcing us to read these texts across race, temporal setting, geographic location, and literary genre. Rather than ignore or dismiss identity differences, I read for the ways identity constructs experiences differently, and for the ways female adolescent protagonists form queer kinship communities as a means of survival.
Future plans and goals: Larissa plans to pursue her doctorate in literary studies with emphases on cultural and performance studies, eventually. She intends to continue her research on performances in music and youth subcultures. Until she returns to school, Larissa is interested in public relations and music journalism. Currently, she is taking a hiatus from academia in an effort to spend time traveling and being with family.