Promoting and Silencing “Queer Voice”: The Role of Educators

• In Event: Adolescent–Adult Relationships as Developmental Spaces: Mechanisms Underlying Positive Development for Diverse Youth

Abstract

The proposed paper will highlight the role that educators—teachers, counselors, administrators, gay-straight alliance advisors, and other school staff—play in the promotion and silencing of students’ “queer voices.” The findings presented will be based on case studies drawn from two waves of interviews—a set of in-depth interviews conducted in 2003 and 2004 among 20 adolescents who self-identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ) and follow-up interviews with six of these participants conducted in 2009 and 2010. Thus, the data trace the evolution of participants’ queer voices into young adulthood and how this development may have been influenced by their adolescent experiences.

The symposium paper will focus on the school-based implications of research profiled in my forthcoming book In a Queer Voice: Journeys of Survival and Self-Discovery, to be published in 2012 by Temple University Press. The research merges two strands of prior work: voice-centered feminist relational psychology, represented most notably by Carol Gilligan’s similarly titled seminal work In a Different Voice, and the research on risk and resilience among LGBTQ youth. Just as Gilligan and other researchers since the 1980s have found that women and adolescent girls often sacrifice their authentic voices to survive in a patriarchal society, the study in In a Queer Voice highlights the ways LGBTQ adolescents can be compelled to silence aspects of who they are in school, family, and community settings in order to maintain relationships with the people and institutions that are most central to their lives. Because the research follows participants’ development over time, however, it not only focuses on the loss of voice suffered by a marginalized group but also on “voices found” through interactions with friends, family members, teachers, mentors, gay-straight alliances, and community-based groups.

In the case studies, ways in which educators were found to be supportive of queer voice included encouraging open communication, being out as LGBTQ themselves, supporting non-traditional gender expression, and opening a space for the discussion of LGBTQ issues in curriculum in both formal and informal ways. Educator behaviors associated with the silencing of queer voice included expressing anti-LGBTQ stereotypes, failing to protect students from harassment, and, if they were LGBTQ themselves, remaining in the closet.

Author

• Michael Sadowski, Bard College