Women's Book Club: (Virtual) Community and Sisterhood Through Reading

Abstract

This paper analyzes reading as a collective activity, where reading circles are spaces where dialogue and reflection are promoted through shared reading. Historically, since their creation in the seventeenth century, women have been the hosts of this type of spaces, encouraging the exchange of perceptions and experiences. Reading circles formed by women will be analyzed as community spaces, and how they have expanded from face-to-face to other environments such as virtuality, in order to have greater reach without losing their function.

Likewise, reading circles will be studied from the vernacular literacy, since they take place within the daily life of women readers. The purpose of this work is to analyze women’s reading circles as spaces that foster the generation of community, such as sorority.