Tools My Mother Gave Me: Four Autoethnographic Poems

Abstract

Poetic inquiry is one approach available to researchers that allows for theory-informed and emotionally-engaged reflexivity. In this article, I share four poems about my mother’s positionality as a white low-income cis-hetero woman raising my brother and myself in the 1980s. Informed by critical sociocultural theory, I use poetry to describe four cultural tools she passed down to me: the Betty Crocker Cake Mix, accurate paperwork, makeup, and parenting magazines. These four research poems were composed through multiple rounds of revision in the context of a graduate-level poetry class resulting in improved aesthetics and qualitative analysis.