Rural girls and small acts of resistance: friendship, identities, futures

In the space of this chapter, I remember a small group of girls from a small rural town and the/ir affective intensities of gender and place, which I captured through a literary arts-based methodology. I wrote, taking careful liberties" with their permission" to poetically recreate their writings and their conversations about and for my research using creative non-fiction, narrative and poetry. In bundling the girls' trajectories of place and writing into stories, I remembered how they fostered friendships and articulated identities as rural girls with aspirations for elsewhere and otherwise, beyond (town) limits and stereotypes. I remember how they moved through high school, their identities more expansive than the surrounding deficit discourse, the labels, the smallness of the town. In small acts of resistance, they offered each other advice, talked of determination and uncertainty, and wrote of longings for place. In a school where male voices were often the loudest among staff and students, these girls resisted conventions of learning, constraints of self, constraints of a small rural town, and school itself.