Becoming a “Mexican feminist”: A minoritized bilingual's development of disciplinary identities through writing

This eight-year longitudinal study explores the roles writing played in the disciplinary “becoming” (Stevens et al., 2008) of Fabiola, a Spanish-English bilingual who began her schooling in English (and the US) in ninth grade and went on to complete a Gender and Women's Studies (GWS) major at a U.S. university. I use a longitudinal interactional histories approach (Kibler, 2013) to examine selected writing events preceding the “critical event” (Webster & Mertova, 2007) of her choice to major in GWS, demonstrating how she engaged in writing tasks that supported her burgeoning interest in feminism even when not yet part of GWS communities. I then turn to two key writing events after Fabiola chose this major that exemplify how she forged unique yet circumscribed disciplinary identities through writing: first, through an essay on queerness and religion, for which she balanced disciplinary and nonacademic audiences, and second through a series of blog posts in which she presented multiple identities (including contested ones) as key to her disciplinary interactions. The article closes with a discussion of relationships among writing, instruction, and disciplinary becoming, as well as an analysis of ways in which Fabiola's biliterate and L2 writer identities were marginalized in this process.