#SoundingOutMySilence: Reading a LGBTQ Youth's Sonic Cartography as Multimodal (Counter)Storytelling

Abstract

AbstractBy partnering theoretical insights from multiliteracies, queer phenomenology, and sound studies, this article underscores sound's capacity as a resource for adolescent multimodal writing. Refracted through a singular LGBTQ youth's practice of sonic cartography, the practice of mapping narrative through sound, the author articulates how sound came to impact the student's multiliterate practice and expression. Findings suggest that sonic cartography became a form of (counter)storytelling. It carried with it new ways of knowing, being, and being known for LGBTQ youths. Presenting a topography of life through phenomenological experiences, the author theoretically reroutes research on adolescent multimodal composition by examining the numerous rhythms, routes, and frictions among sound, identity, writing, and injustice. Pedagogically, the author asks educators to consider how sound operates as more than text, how the spatial stories that students compose may turn up the volume on formal and informal spaces of literacy learning, and how these intersect with issues of identity and power.