Confronting the Gender Trouble for Real

Listening to Anohni's variously vibrating voice: studying transfeminine vocality in 21st-century popular music culture through the concept of vocal figurations

“…More recently, initial studies of transgender singers in popular music (cf. Goldin-Perschbacher 2007, 2015; Maurey 2009; Krell 2013, 2019; Jennex and Murphy 2017; Leibetseder 2017; Välimäki 2017; Pennington 2018; Baitz 2019; Geffen 2020) have begun to draw a complex map of transvocality (Constansis 2008), describing the ways in which trans voices may variously configure the relationships between voices, bodies, and subjects.…”

“…Initial academic studies have challenged biologist discourses of transvocality by exploring the multiple and diverse figurations of voice by transfeminine singers in musical practices such as in performances by Indian hijra singers (Roy 2016), popular music (Välimäki 2017) and Western art music (Sims 2017). Likewise, a rich body of online video tutorials for voice feminisation created by and for trans women forcefully illustrates how transfeminine singers can substantially retrain a wide range of vocal aspects including resonance and muscle memory in ways that create meaningfully altered vocal qualities through physical reconfigurations 6…”