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This collection pushes the boundaries of studies and practices of voice-not only past essential, transcendental, and universal notions of voicing, but also to understudied arenas of voice and identity, especially in race, disability, aging, geographical, Indigenous, trans, and other contexts.
The authors and editors understand the voice as existing both in and across contexts. Case studies oscillate between local and global phenomena to ground voicing in temporal, geographical, and political scales. From South African opera singers to Brazilian countertenors, gender-affirming trans voice care to spectrographic and documentary forms of representing voice, and Indigenous film dubbing to embodied performances of American Sign Language, this collection opens up disciplinarily and epistemologically bound topics to ask how vocality works in a multitude of ways for producing meanings around culture and identity. Moreover, this collection engages and emerges from a broad range of academic ranks, artistic practices, geographies, and identities, and engages interviews, multimedia exhibitions, and more. The contributors situate each act of voicing in its place, time, and connections to questions of power, agency, and advocacy.
This book is for scholars and practitioners of voice and voice studies, and those interested in the structural-and fluid-aspects of identity. The authors address both historical and cutting-edge issues, imbricating vocality in identity.
List of contents
- "Preface: On Language, Place, and the Time in Which this Volume was Compiled"
- "Introduction"
AUTHENTICITIES AND ARCHETYPES 2. "Fashioned Voice: Playing with Identity in the Radiant Field" 3. "The Lure of Authenticity: Vocal Performance in the Star-at-Home Interview" 4. "Doing Voice My Way: Renegotiating Male Vocal Identity at Adolescence" 5. "An Opera Singer's Voice Transition Journal"
QUEERING VOICING 6. "Falsetto and Faggy: Countertenor Singing as Gender Transgressive" 7. "'The Woman's Voice that is a Part of Me': Vocal Performativity and the Joys of Queer Listening (from 'Below')" 8. "'The Lowest Female Singing Voice': Trans Phonotechnics in Sarah Hennies's Contralto" 9. "Performing Racialized Voices and Vocal Minstrelsy on RuPaul's Drag Race"
TECHNOVOCALITIES 10. "Echo-locations: Karaoke Performance and Oceanic Voice" 11. "Visualizing the Voice from Mouth to Microphone to Spectrogram" 12. "Mundane AI: Marked Deadness, Labor, and Gender in AI's Collapsed Present" 13. "Noise-Cancelling Headphones: The Quieted Voices of Neoliberalism"
(DIS)LOCATIONS 14. "ASMR-ing the World: ASMR Aesthetics, Soundwalking Soundwork, and Voicing Sonic Environments" 15. "Original Dub: First-Nation Voice and Language Revitalization" 16. "Voice Beyond the Geographies of Film and Land: The New Multi-Language Platforms of Indian Cinema" 17. "The Cadences of The Cool World" 18. "John Braham, Sacred Tenor: Opera, Jewishness, and British National Identity"
VOICING CITIZENSHIP 19. "Sounding 'Out of Place': Towards a Geopolitics of Racialized Operatic Vocality" 20. "Meaning, Modernity, and the Limits of Metaphor: Kurdish Perspectives on Voice" 21. "Sounding Citizenship in the Carceral State: On Voice, Hip Hop, and Power in Prison" 22. "'You're Doing It Wrong': Decolonizing and Liberating My Voice"
CONTAINING, CONFINING, AND CURATING VOICES 23. "When You Are on Death Row You Aren't Supposed to Have a Voice" 24. "A Clear Voice: Timbre and Technique in the English Choral Tradition" 25. "Navigating Identity, Timbre, and Tradition: A Conversation About the HBCU Choral Experience" 26. "Dear Diary, Have I Told You How Much I Love Creating Opera? (And Also, Here's a Syllabus on Creating Micro-Operas)"
LANGUAGE, ABILITY, AND HEARING CODES / HEARING VOICE 27. "Ghostly Voices: Lip-Syncing, Memory, and AIDS in Dickie Beau's Re-Member Me" 28. "Vocality and Plurality in Sign Language Cover Songs" 29. "Voicing Deaf Characters in Contemporary Hollywood" 30. "Perspective: Identity and Voice from a Critical Disability Lens"
About the author
Amy Skjerseth is Assistant Professor of Popular Music at the University of California, Riverside. Her scholarship focuses on intersections of music, media, material culture, and technology.
Freya Jarman is a Reader in Music at the University of Liverpool. Freya's publications include work on the musical workings of camp, a monograph on
Queer Voices (2011), and a chapter on lip-syncing scenes in films.
Naomi André is the David G. Frey Distinguished Professor in the Department of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is Professor Emerita at the University of Michigan.
