Listening to silences and voices: A methodological framework

This chapter focuses on the Listening Guide, initiated by Carol Gilligan, as a methodological framework for listening to silenced and expressive voices. Feminist research and epistemologies often identify voice, and expressive voices, as demonstrating women’s agency. While this identification might often be precise, one should not neglect the importance and various meanings of silences and silenced voices. Accordingly, silence does not necessarily represent lack of agency and disempowerment. This chapter aims to extend the debate regarding silenced voices and methodology. To extend this debate, the authors offer the use of the Listening Guide within a broader framework of narrative approaches in Social Sciences. This methodology can assist scholars to identify not only what was told, but also how it was told, and what was not told. In this chapter, the context for analysis is women in combat and semi-structured interviews that were conducted with these women in order to identify their silences, as well as their silenced and expressive voices. By employing the Listening Guide methodology, this chapter reveals the variety of silenced as well as expressive voices among Israeli women combat veterans, and analyzes their meanings. The implementation of the Listening Guide assists scholars to uncover the conscious or unconscious use of hidden and expressive voices, and enables scholars to identify silences.