Inauthentic Tales or Resonating Voices?

As folk taxonomies of contemporary sexual identities continue to proliferate, this paper positions narrative research as a productive methodology for troubling the coherence of the ‘normal’. Re-presented from life-history interviews, conducted within a friendship group of gay men over a six month period, are reconstructed accounts of the ‘…processes, procedures, and apparatuses whereby [our] truth and knowledge are [became] produced (Tamboukou & Ball, 2003, p.4). Our endeavors attempt to show something of how we talked ourselves in and out of our scattered, obscure and partial stories of self. Throughout this paper, our disjointed and chaotic narrations aim to undo ‘normalizing’ narratives of educational research. In piecing together our adolescent queering experiences, our fragmented and incoherate voices mingle on the page to show something of the complexity of our narrative experience(s) of self.