In a Human Voice (Carol Gilligan)
J’ai découvert l’autrice et psychologue Carol Gilligan dans un épisode récent du podcast Folie douce de Lauren Bastide. Elle y parlait notamment de son best-seller In a Different Voice, publié en 1982 et qui a semble-t-il révolutionné la psychologie féministe, et de son dernier livre In a Human Voice, publié en 2023 et qui revient plus de quarante ans après sur le sujet de son premier succès.
Carol Gilligan's landmark book In a Different Voice – the “little book that started a revolution” – brought women's voices to the fore in work on the self and moral development, enabling women to be heard in their own right, and with their own integrity, for the first time.
Forty years later, Gilligan returns to the subject matter of her classic book, re-examining its central arguments and concerns from the vantage point of the present. Thanks to the work that she and others have done in recent decades, it is now possible to clarify and articulate what couldn't quite be seen or said at the time of the original publication: that the “different voice” (of care ethics), although initially heard as a “feminine” voice, is in fact a human voice; that the voice it differs from is a patriarchal voice (bound to gender binaries and hierarchies); and that where patriarchy is in force or enforced, the human voice is a voice of resistance, and care ethics is an ethics of liberation. While gender is central to the story Gilligan tells, this is not a story about gender: it is a human story.
With this clarification, it becomes evident why In a Different Voice continues to resonate strongly with people's experience and, perhaps more crucially, why the different voice is a voice for the 21st century.
L’entretien que Carol Gilligan avait accordé à Lauren Bastide m’avait donné envie de lire à la fois In a Different Voice, son succès de 1982, et In a Human Voice, le livre qui en est le prolongement quatre décennies plus tard. J’ai évidemment commencé par le plus ancien, mais j’ai eu beaucoup de mal avec ce livre. Le texte était peut-être trop pointu pour moi, le style trop aride, j’en ai en tout cas abandonné la lecture après quelques chapitres.
Cependant, comme le sujet m’intéressait et que j’avais senti dans le podcast de Laurent Bastide que l’autrice avait des choses vraiment intéressantes à dire, j’ai voulu insister et je me suis plongé dans In a Human Voice. Je ne le regrette pas, car c’est un livre passionnant, voire bouleversant, sur la souffrance psychique que subissent les filles puis les femmes, mais aussi les garçons puis les hommes, dans le système patriarcal.
J’ai apprécié que l’autrice fasse une sorte d’auto-critique ou en tout cas de relecture critique de son premier livre, en tenant compte des remarques que celui-ci a suscité depuis sa sortie. Il y a notamment cet extrait qui reconnait les limites du premier livre et le complète parfaitement :
From the vantage point of the present, then, it has become possible for me to clarify and articulate what couldn’t quite be seen or said at the time when my work was first published: that the “different voice” (the voice of care ethics), although initially heard as a “feminine” voice, is in fact a human voice, that the voice it differs from is a patriarchal voice (listen for the tell-tale gender binaries and hierarchies), and that where patriarchy is in force and enforced, the human voice is a voice of resistance, and care ethics is an ethics of liberation. With this theoretical clarification, it becomes evident why In a Different Voice continues to resonate strongly with people’s experience and, perhaps more crucially, why the different voice is a voice for the twenty-first century.
En tant qu’homme, j’ai également été touché quand l’autrice aborde la question de l’éducation des garçons et de leur « initiation » au patriarcat :
By undercutting human relational capabilities, the initiation into patriarchy compromises children’s ability to survive and to thrive. It also lays the ground for all forms of oppression, whether on the basis of race, class, caste, sexuality, religion, or what have you. This is because children’s internalization of gender codes, which require them to dissociate themselves from aspects of their humanity, clouds their ability to perceive and to resist injustice.
By following a group of 4- and 5-year-olds as they move from prekindergarten through kindergarten and into first grade, Chu saw children who had been attentive, articulate, authentic, and direct in their relationships with one another and with her gradually becoming more inarticulate, more inattentive, more inauthentic, and indirect with one another and with her. They were becoming “boys,” or how boys are often said to be. But, as Chu cautions, boys know more than they show. Chu was tracking a process of initiation whereby children, in their desire to establish themselves as boys, were putting on a cloak of masculinity. They were disguising themselves by shielding those aspects of themselves that would lead them to be seen as not masculine (meaning feminine) or as like a woman (girly or gay), in a world where being a man means being superior.
A picture was settling into place of an initiation that begins with young boys, roughly between the ages of 4 and 7, continues with girls when they reach adolescence (roughly between 11 and 14), and then replays with boys in the late years of high school, when, in the words of one of the boys in Way’s studies, they “know how to be more of a man.” An initiation that mandates dissociation and compromises children’s relational capacities – an initiation that leaves a psychological scar.
The initiation begins with boys. In When Boys Become Boys – the first panel of the triptych – Judy Chu records what she came to know by listening to 4- and 5-year-old boys. She saw evidence of boys’ resistance to becoming a “boy” in their strategic concealment of their empathy and desire for closeness. Chu observes that the very relational capacities boys learn to shield in becoming a “boy,” the empathy and emotional sensitivity that enable them to read the human world around them so accurately and so astutely, are essential if they are to realize the closeness they now seek with other boys. Yet in blunting or concealing these capacities in order to establish themselves as one of the boys, they render that closeness unattainable.
Zéro Janvier – @zerojanvier@diaspodon.fr