Table Of ContentIn a Queer Voice
Michael Sadowski
In a Queer Voice
Journeys of Resilience from Adolescence to Adulthood
Foreword by Carol Gilligan
Temple University Press
Philadelphia
Temple UniversiTy press
philadelphia, pennsylvania 19122
www.temple.edu/tempress
Copyright © 2013 by Temple University
All rights reserved
published 2013
library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication Data
sadowski, michael.
in a queer voice : journeys of resilience from adolescence to
adulthood / michael sadowski ; foreword by Carol Gilligan.
p. cm.
includes bibliographical references and index.
isBn 978-1-4399-0801-3 (cloth : alk. paper) —
isBn 978-1-4399-0802-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) —
isBn 978-1-4399-0803-7 (e-book) 1. Gay youth. 2. Gay
teenagers. 3. Gay students. i. Title.
HQ76.27.y68s23 2013
362.78′66—dc23
2012025885
The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the
American national standard for information sciences—permanence
of paper for printed library materials, Ansi Z39.48-1992
printed in the United states of America
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
Contents
Foreword by Carol Gilligan vii
Introduction: The Importance of Being Heard 1
1 David: The Slow Build of a Voice of Resistance 17
2 Lindsey: Learning a New Language 39
3 Ruth: A Person to Trust and a Place to Belong 60
4 Travis: Twenty-First-Century Everyman 77
5 Jordan: Across the Gender Border—and Back Again 93
6 Eddie: Coming Out and Embracing the World 114
7 The Quest for “One Good Relationship”: Connections
and Disconnections in Adolescence 131
8 Foundations of Queer Voice: Silence and Support
in Schools, Communities, Families, and Society 153
Afterword 170
Acknowledgments 175
Note on the Listening Guide Method 177
References 179
Online Resources for Supporting Queer Youth Voice 185
Index 189
Foreword
Carol Gilligan
never again will a single story be told
as though it’s the only one.
—John Berger
A voice that sounds different may be called just that—a different
voice. Or it may be called odd, or deviant, or queer. The impli-
cation is that there is a right way to speak and that this different
voice is somehow not right. At the time i wrote In a Different Voice, women,
insofar as they differed from men, were considered to be either less or more
than human. like children, they were seen as not fully developed, or they
were regarded as saints. listening to women at that time, i heard the differ-
ences that led Freud to describe women as having “less sense of justice than
men” (Freud [1925] 1961, 257–258) and others to question whether women
in fact had a sense of self. But i questioned the interpretation. The categories
of psychological theory, the conception of self, relationships, and morality,
had been framed by listening to men. What could be learned about human
experience by listening to women?
my ear had been caught by two things: a silence among men and an
absence of resonance when women said what they really felt and thought.
“Would you like to know what i think? Or would you like to know what
i really think?” a woman asked me one day early on in my research. i had
asked her to respond to one of the dilemmas psychologists use to assess
moral development. As her question implied, she had learned to think about
morality in a way that differed from how she really thought. But as she also
revealed, she knew how she really thought as well as how she was supposed
to think. This posed a challenge to the methods of psychological research.
What are the conditions in which people will say or even know what they
viii Foreword
really think and feel? What voices are we listening to, and how do we hear
them?
The inclusion of women’s voices in what had been called the human
conversation changed the voice of the conversation by giving voice to aspects
of human experience that had been for the most part unspoken or unseen. it
shifted the paradigm, changing the categories that shape how we listen and
what we see. The voice once heard as deficient and associated with women—
a voice that joins reason with emotion and self with relationships—turned
out to be a human voice. The splitting of self from relationships and thought
from emotion once taken as markers of development turned out to be mani-
festations of injury or trauma. in his recent book The Age of Empathy, the
primatologist Frans de Waal calls for “a complete overhaul of assumptions
about human nature” (2009, 7). As researchers across the human sciences
are discovering, we had been telling false stories about ourselves.
In a Queer Voice joins the series of books that have set out to correct our
perception of ourselves by giving voice to those among us who have been
driven into silence. i have known michael sadowski since he enrolled in my
seminar on the listening Guide method with a particular interest in listening
to the voices of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender youth. Within a society
infected by homophobia, their voices were heard as queer. listening to their
ways of speaking about themselves and their experiences of being in the world,
sadowski found that their voices queer the categories of sexuality and gender
that presume heterosexuality. The analogy to In a Different Voice implied by
his title captures this shift in interpretation. like the different voice that joins
reason with emotion and self with relationships, the queer voice he asks us to
listen to spurs a reconsideration of what it means to be human.
in Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights, Kenji yoshino
(2006), writing as a poet and a legal scholar, describes the many ways he
felt called on to cover his gay identity and the struggles he faced in seeking
authenticity in his personal and professional life. if he could not reveal who
he knew himself to be, how could he be loved? And what was the meaning
of acceptance? The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott and others have written
about the costs of assuming a false self. To yoshino, the demand to cover
is the civil rights issue of our time. At a telling moment in his book, he
describes the responses he encountered from straight men when he presented
his work, their anger at the failure to recognize that they, too, feel pres-
sures to cover who they are. At the root of the problem are the categories of
identity often written into the law that force assimilation to a false notion of
humanity. yoshino urges us to challenge these categories rather than sacri-
fice our desire for authenticity.
Foreword ix
The “queer voice” sadowski describes heeds this challenge. in transform-
ing a corrosive self-silencing into an open protest for equal rights and free-
dom of expression, it is a voice of resistance. more specifically, it is a voice
that resists patriarchal social structures. The gender binary, in which being a
man means not being a woman or like a woman, and the gender hierarchy,
in which human qualities designated masculine are privileged over those
considered feminine, are the DnA of patriarchy—the building blocks of
a patriarchal order. in challenging both the binary and the hierarchy, the
queer voice articulates an ethic of care and the values of a democratic soci-
ety: the belief that everyone’s voice should be listened to carefully and heard
with respect and the recognition that equal voice is a prerequisite for free
and open debate. in sadowski’s research, the development of a queer voice is
associated with signs of psychological resilience and health.
like yoshino, sadowski reveals the costs of demands to cover—the
assault on personal integrity and the sacrifice of authentic relationships.
extending the project of In a Different Voice, he brings voices that have his-
torically been silenced into the conversation. As a voice of resistance and
resilience, the queer voice is a voice of hope. listening to the young people
in his book, we just might, as sadowski suggests, “learn a new language for
speaking about ourselves and one another based not on who we are told we
should be but on who we are.”
