Trans* Vocality: lived experience, singing bodies, and joyful politics

Abstract

In this article, we argue that with critical feminist materialisms, it is possible to develop what we have already learned so far from poststructural gender deconstructivism while also asking what can yet be learned from bodies, experience, and materiality. We continue to reject essentialist understandings of gender but maintain that there is a need to emphasize the material dimension of lived experiences. ‘Voice’ is ‘material relationality’ that has not yet received enough attention despite its centrality to political pursuits. In tracing the voice and its relation to materialisms, phenomenology, and poststructuralism, we frame ‘vocality’ as an embodied and lived phenomenon, developing a theoretical lens for the purpose of investigating the enactment of agency of trans* vocality. This phenomenological, materialist approach turns to the lived experiences of transgender and non-binary singers to both ground theory on gender and understand what is political about trans*vocality in singing. Using material from an ongoing research project, we seek to show how the constitution of singing subjects is political and, additionally, how through singing – a kind of ‘sensuous knowledge’ – trans* vocal expression can be a joyful resource for politicism and social change.