Stand Up, Keep Quiet, Talk Back: Agency, Resistance and Possibility in the School Stories of Lesbian Youth

Elizabethe C. Payne, Ph.D.

Paper Title: Stand Up, Keep Quiet, Talk Back: Agency, Resistance and Possibility in the School Stories of Lesbian Youth

This paper utilizes portions of a broader life history study with adolescent lesbians, to explore their experiences of school and their resistance to its heteronormalizing culture. Their stories demonstrate not only the “ways in which heterosexual identities are constructed as normal while lesbian… identities are constructed as outside acceptability” within schools (Youdell, 2005, 251), but the creative strategies they employed to “stick it out” (participant) and stay in school. These young lesbian women coped with the stresses and institutional silences around their non-hetero genders and sexualities by choosing their own silence, addressing the homophobia directly, and through telling their stories. The strategies shared by these young women challenge the representation of sexual identity non-disclosure (“staying in the closet”) as “immature” and frame their strategic choices within schools through their careful assessment of their heterosexist environments. Their silences demonstrate not instability in their lesbian identities, but awareness and agency. This study served as the basis for the design of the Reduction of Stigma in Schools program.