Glitching the Gendered Voice

Abstract

Since recording technology first severed the human voice from its originating body, the uncanniness of the sourceless voice has coincided with theoreticizations of queerness. The concept of homosexuality and the proliferation of home phonographs emerged at around the same point in history, and both interventions confounded traditional imaginings of domesticity, intimacy, and communion. As playback technology has grown more responsive and complex, so have defections from normative gender and heterosexuality. Electronic voice processing furthers the confusion of source presented by playback, making electronic music an especially rich field of expression for queer and transgender musicians in particular. This chapter traces the technologically mutated voice through the past century of recording, focusing on its relationship to unruly expressions of gender from electronic music’s origins to its present iterations. Though not only queer artists have participated in this evolutionary process, this chapter highlights the ways trans musicians in particular have used glitch and distortion to rupture the habit of listening for normative gender, sounding new ways of moving and being in their wake.