"She'd learn over and over from Pa: these men had to have the last punch" : A literary analysis of Delia Owen's Where the Crawdads Sing and how it can be incorporated in the EFL classroom to discuss men's violence against women

Sammanfattning: This essay offers a literary study of the novel Where the Crawdads Sing written by Delia Owens published in 2018. The aim is to analyze the presence of men’s violence against women by focusing on the protagonist Kya. Moreover, the essay presents a discussion of how the novel can function as a resource in the EFL classroom by applying critical literacy and rape culture as approaches. The essay combines feminist and Foucauldian theory as well as statements made by Hannah Arendt to analyze how the relationship between power and violence can explain men’s violence against women. The findings show that due to her independence as a woman, Kya threatens the social structures where patriarchy reigns superior and that men’s violence against women becomes present when power is threatened. Further, the pedagogical analysis shows that the novel could be used as a resource to discuss how rape is normalized due to gender inequalities where critical literacy is used to question current power structures and to discover silent voices.