On Shelby Knox and Finding Your Feminist Voice

           Growing up, I remember being taught of the importance of voice.  English teachers would repeatedly stress, “Find your voice!”  Or they would tell me, “Your voice isn’t really coming though in this paper.”  At times I was commanded, “Keep your voice down!”  And other times I was encouraged, “Speak up!  Use your voice.”  These various encounters really only ever taught me one thing, and it didn’t even have very much to do with voice at all.  They taught me that in this world, people care so much more about how you say something than what it is you are actually saying.  In other words, my fifteen and a half years in the United States school system—both public and private—has taught me that before you say whatever it is that you’re thinking of saying, you better think long and hard about how you’re going to say it.  What this does is it ends up reinforcing traditional hierarchies in which people who have had the most formal training and developed effective forms of communication are valued over those with equally valid arguments but who have yet to perfect their communication skills.  It is this hierarchy that the 2005 documentary, “The Education of Shelby Knox” attempts to disrupt.

            The film follows Shelby Knox—a 15-year-old girl from the second most conservative city in the nation—in her battle for a drastic reform of her school district’s sex education abstinence only policy.  More importantly, however, the piece is about a young woman refusing to be rendered voiceless.  It’s about a sophomore in high school going against conservative parents, school boards, and churches and refusing to give up even after experiencing the pain of failure.  It’s about realizing that despite everything that we’ve been told, emotions are good and are our way of coping with the frustration of being socially gagged and made to accept instead of critique.  It’s about saying how you feel and what you think even if it isn’t pretty at first because we only ever grow from experience.  It’s about recognizing “failure” as a starting point, not a finish line.  It’s about admitting that even though fighting for social change is hard, sitting back silently is harder.

            These are the types of messages that young people, especially those belonging to marginalized groups, need to hear.  They need to know that what they think and what they have to say is valuable, even if it is difficult to articulate.  They need to realize that when there are no young people being represented in the mainstream debates surrounding social issues that very much impact their lives, there is a problem.

            As I watched the film, I reflected on my own quest for my voice.  I tried to remember when it was that I finally realized that the reason I hadn’t been able to find it was not because I didn’t have it, but because the entire concept of voice, as it had been imposed on me from a young age, was such that I would never find it within myself.  I am not an old white heterosexual man like all the men that wrote the books used to teach me what voice is.  The reason that I could not find my voice was because I wasn’t looking for my voice I was looking for the voices of others within me.  It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment, but as I think about it and how liberating it was I really applaud Knox and her willingness to share her personal experience and to ask young feminists, “This is what finding my feminist voice looked like for me, what will it look like for you?”