Do Voices Matter?

Vocality,
Materiality, Gender Performativity

ANNETTE SCHLICHTER

Abstract While vocal acts, such as interpellation and speech acts, constitute a network of theoretical nodes
in Butler’s writings, her theory of gender performativity neglects to theorize the mediation of such acts
through the voice and its technologies. In a close reading of Butler’s influential texts, the paper examines
the ramifications of a notion of gender performativity that ignores the performative aspects of the voice,
asking what it means to think a body without a voice. What notions of materiality and subjectivity does
such a thinking it assume? How does it understand the relationship of performativity, performance and
sound technology? I argue that the repression of the sonoric aspects of the voice can be read as a symptom
of the role of materiality in the theory of gender performativity. Despite Butler’s attempts to attend to the
material body within a discourse of the performative, the notion of materiality is constrained through the
economy of the sign and remains subordinated to the realm of intelligibility, a hierarchy that Butler
explicitly rejects. However, the material voice will finally supplement and subvert the theory of gender
performativity.

Keywords body, materiality, performance, performativity, voice

. . . the voice is there to be forgotten in its materiality; only at this cost does it fill its primary
function. (Michel Chion)

Track 1: Sounds of Silence in a Little Theoretical Theater

What does it mean to theorize a body without a voice? What are the
ramifications of a widely influential theory of gendered bodies that presents

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32 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 1

these bodies as full of speech but silent at the same time? These questions, which
animate the following reflections, refer to Judith Butler’s groundbreaking theory
of gender performativity, which like no other has left its mark on contemporary
gender and queer studies. These considerations might come as a surprise since
vocal acts, such as interpellation and speech acts, constitute a network of theore-
tical nodes in Butler’s reflections on the material production of subjects and
identities. And yet, her theory of gender performativity and the consecutive
deliberations about the matter of bodies do not account for voice as sound, nor
do they acknowledge the mediation of vocal acts through sound technologies.
Let’s proceed by listening to two instances of silencing in Gender Trouble.
In her ingenious evocation of Aretha Franklin’s performance of Carole
King’s ‘You Make Me Feel (like a Natural Woman)’, Butler uses the song as
an example of the denaturalization of gender:
‘I feel like a woman’ is true to the extent that Aretha Franklin’s invocation of the defining
Other is assumed: ‘You make me feel like a natural woman.’ This achievement requires a dif-
ferentiation from the opposite gender. (1999: 29–30)

And a footnote adds:

Aretha’s song, originally written by Carole King, also contests the naturalization of gender.
‘Like a natural woman’ is a phrase that suggests that ‘naturalness’ is only accomplished
through analogy or metaphor. (1999: 199)

The utilization of the song perfectly captures the construction and

naturalization of gender through language, especially the linguistic act of
interpellation. Its meaning, produced through the spoken (sung) word and the
situation of address, expresses a critique of naturalized notions of heteronor-
mative gender. However, neither the specific qualities of Franklin’s singing
nor the transducing technologies that allow Butler to listen to the words play
a role in the text. Rather, Franklin’s voice floats through Gender Trouble as a
voice without theory, or, as Judith Peraino aptly puts it, ‘theory au naturel’
(2007: 60).
Not only does Butler miss out on theorizing the voice, she eventually pre-
sents us with voiceless bodies. A relevant act of silencing occurs in one of the
arguably most influential scenes in the history of queer and feminist theories: the
deployment of drag as a vehicle of the denaturalization of gender. At the center
of the theory of performativity, the drag scene serves as an allegory of the de/nat-
uralization of gender since it illuminates the functioning of the heterosexual
matrix. It exhibits the disparate elements that have to be aligned for a proper gen-
der identity to exist so that someone is recognizable as a person. As Butler
famously argues, drag makes visible

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 Do Voices Matter? & 33

the distinction between the anatomy of the performer and the gender that is being
performed. But we are actually in the presence of three contingent dimensions of signifi-
cant corporeality. If the anatomy of the performer is already distinct from the gender of
the performer, and both of those are distinct from the gender of the performance, then the
performance suggests a dissonance not only between sex and performance, but sex and gen-
der, and gender and performance. As much as drag creates a unified picture of ‘woman’
(what its critics often oppose), it also reveals the distinctness of those aspects of gendered
experience which are falsely naturalized as a unity through the fiction of heterosexual
coherence. (1999: 175)

Because Butler focuses on the picture of gender, while excluding the voice as
one of the relevant aspects of ‘significant corporeality’ of the dramatic perfor-
mance, her ‘little theoretical theater’ (Althusser, 1971: 163) of gender trouble
remains fully contained by the logic of the visual.1 The repression of the voice
in the spectacle of drag turns the drag scene into an allegory of gender performa-
tivity as a theory which attempts to make bodies speak but simultaneously mutes
their voices.
This silencing by a theory that tries to explain the production of corporeality
and subjectivity is remarkable insofar as the voice as a material as well as a per-
formative phenomenon would suit Butler’s theoretical endeavor. In his book
The Science of the Singing Voice, musicologist Johan Sundberg describes the
intricate vocal apparatus that produces the rather complex materiality of the
voice:
All sounds can be considered voice sounds if they originate from an airstream from the lungs
that is processed through the vocal folds and then modified by the pharynx, the mouth, and
perhaps also the nose cavities ... (1989: 1)

Voice, thus, marks a passage from the inside of bodies to the exterior, and its
materiality is rather delicate, even paradoxical. Lacanian scholar of the voice
Mladen Dolar captures the paradox as ‘object voice’, following Lacan’s render-
ing of the voice as objet a, an object that emerges from the body but is neither
fully defined by matter nor completely beyond it.2 He aptly describes the ‘object
voice’ as ‘a bodily missile which has detached itself from the source, emancipated
itself, yet remains corporeal ... So the voice stands ... at the intersection of lan-
guage and the body, but this intersection belongs to neither’ (2006: 73). Dolar
perceives this paradoxical vocal production also as transgressive, insofar as the
voice is characterized by a surplus of meaning. Investigating our aesthetic per-
ception of the voice, he argues that the appreciation of a beautiful voice, such
as in opera, already implies that the voice does not necessarily support the mes-
sage in an act of communication but that it interrupts it. Indeed, such ‘voice
fetishism’ indicates that there is something to the voice that is ‘different from’ the
meaning of the utterance. Rethinking the voice as an excess or an internal

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34 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 1

difference of communication, Dolar describes it as the ‘vanishing mediator’ of

meaning: ‘the voice is precisely that which cannot be said’ (2006: 15).
The transgressive character of the singing voice has been addressed by a range
of scholars. Musicologist Michelle Duncan, for instance, argues that voice ‘puts
matter into circulation, matter that is more or other than language, more or other
than even performative utterance’ (2004: 303). Intending to bring the voice to the
forefront of opera studies, Duncan criticizes its disembodiment in approaches based
on Lacanian psychoanalysis, which, according to her reading, dematerializes the
voice by conceptualizing it as something that cannot be articulated, ‘both a meta-
phorical and a literal gap’ (2004: 285). On the one hand, Duncan’s emphatic writing
aims for the recognition of the embodied voice in opera, which ‘produces a material
effect of the body on the body’ (2004: 291). While she argues against the notion of
the voice as ‘fleeting ephemera’, Duncan ultimately acknowledges the elusiveness of
the material force she describes: ‘In its magical fluidity, voice is inextricably bound
up with the condition of language and yet is something that is impossible to pin
down ... Somehow voice and body always elude capture.’ (2004: 285)
The scholarship on the different aspects of the transgressive voice illuminates
its particular and curious materiality but also runs the risk of essentializing vocal
acts as ontologically excessive and overflowing. Such a representation of vocaliza-
tion is problematic since it is the effect of a disregard for some of the important
socio-cultural conditions of vocalizations. As Jonathan Sterne writes in his cultural
history of sound and its technologies in western modernity: ‘that elusive inside
world of sound – the sonorous, the auditory, the heard, the very density of sonic
experience – becomes perceptible only though its exteriors ... Sound is an artifact
of the messy and political human sphere.’ (2003a: 13) So, while the speaking, and
particularly the singing voice might transcend socio-material boundaries, join and
simultaneously separate bodily interiorities and exteriorities, the act of producing
a song should not be fully detached from the messiness of the social and cultural
regimes it is embedded in.
Musicologist Suzanne Cusick, inspired by Butler’s notion of performativity,
analyzes speech and song in western culture as forms of discipline of the vocaliz-
ing bodies. In a striking passage on the act of speaking, Cusick describes a speak-
er’s inevitable, ongoing ‘subordination to language’:
Speech is incomprehensible unless the mouth disciplines the sound produced by the motion
of breath out from the body’s interior, so as to make that sound conform to systems of mean-
ing that are intelligible in the outside world. (1999: 30)

If the act of speaking can be understood as a physio-linguistic (soma-semiotic)

process of subjection, the act of western singing is often portrayed as a form

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 Do Voices Matter? & 35

of expression of interiority. Yet, Cusick’s work reconceptualizes it as cultural prac-

tice that produces a gendered subjectivity:
The act of singing a song is always an act that replicates acceptance of patterns that are intel-
ligible to one’s cohort in a culture. Thus, it physically re-enacts, deep in the throat, the trans-
action that Eurocentric development theory asserts as the one that creates a gendered
subjectivity. That is, it re-enacts the transaction between a very young person who is just
coming to know the borders of the body, and the extraterritorial culture in which that person
must learn to function. (1999: 30)

In Cusick’s writing, vocalization is to be perceived as socio-cultural practice

shaped through specific disciplinary regimes. While the musicologist draws her
examples from US contexts, ethnographic and linguistic research has investigated
the production of social bodies and their boundaries through different forms of
vocalization. Thus, ethnographer Nadia Seremetakis’s insightful study of death
rites in Inner Mani, Greece, a region on the cultural margins of Europe, explains
the feminization of mourning rites with the engagement of women’s bodies
through their ‘corporeal mimesis of death, the transformation of their bodies
into a text of disorder, (which) is part of an incremental process of desocializa-
tion’ (1991: 74). This impersonation of death involves a significant shift in sound
regimes, a change from a low voicing regime that represents order and interiority
to a high voicing, which pushes the breath to the exterior, where it resonates as
disorder (1991: 72). The transition from life to death is expressed by the women’s
high screaming. As Seremetakis’s description makes clear, women are the ones
‘who emit sounds in the significant rituals, but they perform within a discourse
that is binding to all members of society’.3
While such studies make us aware of the socio-cultural condition of vocal
acts and their effects, the arguments do not necessarily negate the transgressive
potential of the voice. Rather, vocal practices can be understood as disciplining
acts, whose ambiguous materiality makes excess possible, an excess that might
create openings in the production of meaningful social subjects. Because of the
paradoxical materiality and its performative capacities, the voice seems to offer
itself to Butler’s theory of gender performativity but, as her discussion of Aretha
Franklin’s song and the treatment of the voice in the drag scene already indicate,
the material voice does not resonate fully with the philosopher’s discourse.
By addressing the silencing acts in Butler’s writings, I am not disputing the
expediency of her notion of performative gender for thinking about vocal acts.
On the contrary, in addition to Peraino, musicologists such as Cusick and
Duncan have made very productive use of Butler’s writing on performativity
in order to theorize the matter of singing (Duncan) and the gendering of vocal
performances (Cusick, Peraino), and I will return to some of their ideas later

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36 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 1

on.4 However, they are less concerned with an analysis of the status of the voice
in Butler’s own writings; nor are they interested in the technological re/produc-
tion of the voice that often is the condition of possibility of our engagement with
vocal performances today. I find it a little paradoxical and utterly challenging
that their examination of vocal acts is based on a theory of gender performativity
that disavows the voice. Hence my question: why is the dematerialization of the
voice necessary in the discourse that denaturalizes gender? In the following,
I will first explore the ramifications of Butler’s refusal to acknowledge the voice
of performative gender as a form of phonophobia that emerges from her specific
situatedness as a feminist philosopher engaged in deconstruction. This phono-
phobia functions, as I will show, as a discursive symptom of an ambiguity
towards physical materiality. As ‘signifying formation’, a coded message that
addresses the Symbolic the symptom is ‘a kind of prolongation of the commu-
nication by other means; the failed, repressed word articulates itself in a coded,
ciphered form’ (Žižek, 1992: 424). The symptom as a ‘wanting-to-say’ (Miller,
2006) will then hopefully turn into a saying of the voice, or rather, a voicing since
my unraveling of this signifying formation should eventually lead to a return of
the repressed voice to Butler’s discourse and affect the understanding of the pro-
duction of gender that it suggests.

Track 2: Situating Silence, or, Feminism, Phonocentrism, Deconstruction

Of course, Butler’s writing does not directly emerge from discourses on sound.
Rather, her early work needs to be read as an engagement with both the feminist
debates of the 1980s and with Derrida’s critique of phonocentrism. As Derrida
famously argues, the western metaphysical tradition confounds logo- and
phonocentrism, positing the voice as a natural actualization of language-
as-meaning and a source of self-presence. In this tradition, writing, in the sense
of phonetic writing, is understood as derivative of speech, i.e. speech appears as
the origin of writing, as that which contains meaning. Speech’s privileged rela-
tionship to thought and meaning is what according to Derrida characterizes ‘that
logocentrism which is also a phonocentrism: absolute proximity of voice and
being, of voice and the meaning of being, of voice and the ideality of meaning’
(1998: 11–12). Voice has become the carrier of self or identity. At the same time,
however, speech effaces the process of signification through the assumption of
the voice’s relationship to self, this ‘absolute proximity’, which Derrida calls
‘auto-affection’: ‘This experience of the effacement of the signifier in the voice
is not merely one illusion among many – since it is the condition of the very idea
of truth . . . This illusion is the history of truth.’ (1998: 20). By dismantling the

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 Do Voices Matter? & 37

Western subject’s illusion of self-presence, Derrida also argues – at least implicitly

– for the materiality of voice as a condition of the production of meaning.
And yet, speech in the Derridian critique of phonocentrism is exclusively
figured as thought, as Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero claims in her study,
With More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (2005).
Examining the role of the voice in the history of philosophy, she detects in Der-
rida’s Grammatology the traces of a logocentric videocentrism that has to dis-
avow the material voice. According to Cavarero, the metaphysical tradition
tends towards a ‘devocalization’ of speech, a method, or strategic decision to
‘(thematize) speech while neglecting the vocality of speakers’ (2005: 14). In
Derrida’s work, she argues, the voice, associated with time, is represented as
an acoustic signifier that is more or less collapsed with the signified, hence giving
the illusion of presence. In contrast, writing – ‘trace par excellence, spacing,
movement, genuine play of signs’ – is interestingly subversive to Derrida because
its spatial organization undermines the absolute identification of signifier and
signified that voice seems to present (2005: 222). Because of its spatiality, writing
is that which Derrida rearticulates as arche-writing, a principle of differentiation
that is the condition of language (as meaning) – both in the form of speech and
writing. This privileging of writing ties Derrida’s treatment of the phone to a tra-
dition of logocentrism-as-videocentrism, since his thinking ‘denies to the voice a
meaning of its own that is not always already destined to speech’ (Cavarero,
2005: 13).5 The insightful discussion of Derrida’s acknowledgment of the mate-
riality of language in Alexander Weheliye’s book, Phonographies: Grooves in
Sonic Afro-Modernity adds to this analysis by noting the universalizing implica-
tions of Derrida’s articulation of arche-writing. Weheliye argues that the specific
qualities of such material acts as speaking and especially singing cannot be the-
orized since ‘Derrida’s argument, while attuned to the constitutive writingness
of all linguistic signs, redacts these as only linguistic marks’ without differentiat-
ing between visual and sonorous qualities of signifiers. Here, Weheliye correctly
diagnoses the continuation of a Post-Saussurian model that maintains ‘the lin-
guistic as the prima facie from which to think and imagine all vocal utterances’
(2005: 34).
Gender Trouble develops a critique of feminist phonocentrism (even if
Butler herself does not use the term), from which the theory of gender performa-
tivity emerges, and it inherits some of the problems of Derrida’s reading of the
treatment of the sonic. What I refer to as ‘feminist phonocentrism’ resonates in
texts that construct ‘the female voice’ as the representation of an authentic female
self, while that self-representation is also contrasted with patriarchal misrepre-
sentations of women, which it supposedly corrects. The phonocentric project

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38 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 1

assumes a ‘natural’ relationship of the voice, the female body and female identity
as the truth of the woman’s self.6 Ironically, the material voice is banned from
such arguments. Instead, a great number of feminist critiques of representation
equate ‘speech’ and ‘voice’ as metaphors of agency and self-representation,
which also reads as self-presence. These function as tropes of gendered power
and its absence, suggesting that in the tradition of Western thinking, woman is
dispossessed of the voice, which is simultaneously the voice of reason and the
voice of power/authority. By working towards creating spaces for self-
representations through women’s authentic voices, feminism aims at giving
women that metaphorical voice-as-agency, thereby allowing for an authentic
self-presence. In other words, feminist critiques of representation tend both to
participate in the tradition of western phonocentrism and are simultaneously
phonophobic in the sense that they speak of the voice only figuratively.
Butler targets feminism’s representational politics by laying open the uni-
versalizing mechanisms of the voice-giving project. She shows how feminism,
while claiming to be the ‘voice’ of women, produces its own subject – ‘women’
– in the form of a universalized identity of particular women. This representa-
tional problem is the effect of the phonocentric notion of gender identity, since
it is based on the idea of women’s common interior essence preexisting represen-
tation. Following Derrida, Butler characterizes as metaphysical substance this
essence, the allegedly authentic female self that would be expressed by a subject
in an adequately gendered (here: female) body. Thus, the phonocentric feminist
tradition predefines women’s identity, or what a woman could, or rather should,
be. Assuming that a ‘truth of sex’ be expressed through the gendered body, such
thinking produces the abjection of those who do not present an easily perceiva-
ble correspondence between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, those Butler deems ‘unintelligi-
ble’, or later refers to as ‘precarious subjects’.
Butler then establishes ‘gender performativity’ as a counter-discourse to
feminism’s representational politics with its phonocentric notions of (gendered)
identities. Against the auto-affective ideas of identity, she claims that the ‘meta-
physical substance’ which is perceived as the source of gender expression is actu-
ally the effect of an ongoing series of corporeal enactments within a binary
gender system. A series of acts produce the truth of self as a ‘performative
accomplishment’ (Butler, 1999: 179), while this accomplishment is also the effect
of ‘a subtle and politically enforced performativity’ (Butler, 1999: 187, 189)
within a specific ‘cultural apparatus’, namely heteronormativity, which con-
strains the possible performance. This powerful conceptualization of (gender)
identity as performative allows for an escape from the metaphysics of feminist
phonocentrism but, unfortunately, it reinscribes the phonophobia we find in

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 Do Voices Matter? & 39

feminist and Derridian attitudes toward the voice. The work of both writers
remains prone to what German media philosopher Sybille Krämer has described
as a ‘repression of orality, insofar as it is to be understood as a mediated phenom-
enon, namely vocality’ (1998: 40; my translation). As I will show in the following
section, Butler cannot hear the material voice because of her ambivalence
towards the matter of bodies.
The treatment of materiality in her works has recently been addressed by a
number of critics. Standing out among them is Vicky Kirby’s very sophisticated
analysis, which relates a focus on the visual in Butler’s work to her investment in
the role of signification in the constitution of bodies. Kirby’s insightful writing
has been inspiring for my own analysis of materiality insofar as it makes clear the
impact of Butler’s reliance on matter as sign. Kirby first of all notes that not the
‘lived sense of the bodily substance (but) the body’s surface becomes the site of
engagement’ (2002: 278). At the heart of the Butlerian discourse of physical
materiality is an engagement with materiality as textuality, which results in a
reading of ‘the body as a shifting text, or discursive effect, such that the body’s
perceived outline is constantly changing’. As Kirby convincingly states, ‘the
materiality of matter, its palpability and physical insistence, is rendered unspeak-
able and unthinkable in Butler’s account, for the only thing that can be known
about it is that it exceeds representation’ (2002: 269). In other words, the philo-
sopher maintains a barrier between nature and culture and privileges the realm of
culture as that in which the body is constructed through material signifiers.
I will utilize Kirby’s assessment of Butler’s discourse of the body as ani-
mated by signification. The investment in signification, which is manifest in a
concentration on the visual aspects of physicality and on the emphasis on speech
as pure production of meaning, entails, as I will argue, the repression of the voice.
At the same time, my appreciation of the vocal separates my analysis from
Kirby’s, in particular with regard to the critical strategy she offers for undermin-
ing the binary of nature/culture that Butler reinstates. In a return to Derrida,
Kirby suggests positing nature as ‘an outside [to discourse] that reads, an outside
that writes’ (2002: 278). As we have seen in Cavarero’s and Weheliye’s critiques
of Derrida’s notion of writing, a certain caution towards the claims about
the privileging of writing, which becomes possible through a denigration of the
phoné, is in order. While Kirby successfully collapses the boundaries of nature
and culture in the name of intelligibility, she does so by returning to the cultu-
rally dominant figure of the visualizing practices of a reading and writing, a turn
that risks reinscribing the dominance of the intelligible. In contrast, vocality can-
not be fully contained within the economy of signification. Rather, voice func-
tions as a medium of intelligible speech but as material object also transgresses

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its boundaries. An analysis of Butler’s work via the consideration of her treat-
ment of voice will confront us with a material multiplicity of the body.

Track 3: Muted Bodies, Acts of Speech

One might argue that by advocating a politics of performativity that would
eventually evacuate the visual acts of their meaning, Butler launches a critique
against western culture’s privileging of the visual sphere and its construction of (ima-
ginary) gendered difference as an effect of the heterosexual matrix, or the ‘universal
institution of heteronormativity’ (Deuber-Mankowsky and Holzhey, 2009: 18).
However, as we have already seen in her interpretation of the drag scene, the theory
of gender performativity remains fully contained by the logic of the visual, and the
privileging of visuality over other forms of perception manifests itself as a tendency
in her earlier works. In order to understand fully the implications of Butler’s privi-
leging of the visual aspect in Gender Trouble, it has to be situated in relation to But-
ler’s interest in language.
While Gender Trouble introduces the notion of performative gender at
the intersection of the theatrical and the linguistic, the text also relies on
language as ‘both an overarching template of binary regulation, a structural
differential, as well as a discursive configuration that orders information into
normative patterns and practices of intelligibility and legitimacy’ (Kirby,
2006: 24). The overarching function of the linguistic is emphasized in But-
ler’s continuation and modification of her theory of performativity in Bodies
That Matter as well as in later works on performativity. Averting a
simplifying notion of the performative that would understand it merely as
a voluntary and intentional theatrical act of an individual agent, Butler
emphasizes the repeatability of acts in the production of a gendered identity.
She theorizes the logic of the production of that illusionary gender identity
by introducing a Derridian understanding of iterability and Austin’s speech
act theory. Derrida’s suggestion that (language-as-) writing functions in the
radical absence of an author or addressee, based on the repeatability of the
linguistic sign, allows Butler to remove the intentional subject as performing
agent in order to foreground the functioning of norms. Through the notion
of repeatability as a structuring element of gender performance, she can
emphasize the citationality of gender, i.e. its functioning as a derivative
embedded in discourses that constrain its production but also allow for
openings and shifts in the production of gender identities. It will lead her
to an articulation of a linguistically shaped process of materialization that
institutes differently gendered bodies.

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Bodies that Matter is introduced through the question how the material and
the performative can be linked in order to think performativity as a notion that
would overcome such fundamental binaries as intelligibility and materiality,
mind and body. In response, the book proposes a ‘notion of matter’ as a process
of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary,
fixity, and surface we call matter’ (1993: 9–10; emphasis in original). Interested
in the social and political conditions of the production of embodied subjects,
Butler criticizes Derrida’s use of language as ‘pure form’ (1997: 150). In contrast,
her idea of the materialization of sex makes her critique of social abjection
both intensely dramatic and powerful since the production of the intelligible
and unintelligible does not only happen in the realm of consciousness but in
the realm of the material, the physical. While vocalization can be thought of as
one of the practices of the materialization of bodies, Butler’s theory of materia-
lization as that which discursively establishes and shapes bodies collapses vocal
matter into the ‘discursive’ and thereby precludes a closer examination of more
concrete material discourse-practices that produce bodies.
When in Bodies That Matter she characterizes performativity as ‘a
reiteration of a norm or a set of norms’, she abandons the earlier notion of
gender as act or action and, more cautiously, claims that it (performativity)
‘acquires an act-like status in the present, [which] conceals or dissimulates the
conventions of which it is a repetition’ (Butler, 1993: 12). In the name of a
claim to the historicity of materiality, the speech act is being imposed on the
visual enactment of the performative gender, a move that aims at evacuating
the performative of the theatrical, while trying to hold on to a potential thea-
tricality of the speech act:
This act is not primarily theatrical; indeed its apparent theatricality is produced to the extent
that its historicity remains dissimulated (and conversely, its theatricality gains a certain
inevitability given the impossibility of a full disclosure of its historicity). (Butler, 1993: 13)

The reference to the act’s theatricality in particular begs the question

whether it would not precisely be the speaking voice that is the condition of the
performative as theatrical, while it can also be something other than theatrical – a
material practice providing a condition for the production of meaning. So, we
might hear (or just imagine?) an allusion to voice in the statement: ‘Within
speech act theory, the performative is that discursive practice that enacts or pro-
duces that which it names’ (Butler, 1993: 13). Would vocalization not offer itself
as one of those discursive practices?
Speech act theory used within a discourse that theorizes matter seems to
demand attention to forms of vocalization, and in her later work, such as

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42 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 1

Excitable Speech, Butler gestures toward the vocal through her insistence on ‘the
status of speech as bodily act’ (1997: 152). Distinguishing speech from writing,
she insists that ‘the incongruous interrelatedness of body and speech ... the excess
in speech that must be read along with, and often against, the description’ (1997:
152). This statement reads like the linguistic paradox of the voice that Dolar
describes when he writes that the voice ‘is there, in the very act of saying,
but it eludes any pinning down, to the point where we could maintain that
it is the non-linguistic, the extra-linguistic element, which enables speech
phenomena, but cannot itself be discerned by linguistics’ (2006: 15).
However, Butler’s theory does not manage to capture the voice since her
greatest concern remains the body’s legibility, which is, as has been noted,
a form of (logocentric) visualization.
While insisting on the body as material, physical condition of speech, the
philosopher does not listen properly but reads speech and body. In her afterword
to Shoshana Felman’s The Scandal of the Speaking Body Butler praises Felman’s
interpretation of the speech act as bodily act as an understanding that disrupts the
notion of a sovereign subject of speech, but, curiously, she renders the body’s
materiality in speech a strictly visible entity. Agreeing with Felman’s insistence
on the corporeality of the speech act, Butler comments: ‘we find that the very
notion of performance requires the body because a speech act is a vocalization,
which requires the mouth as its organ and its vehicle’ (2002: 115). However, the
aural is never Butler’s concern. Emphasizing the mouth, she rather refers to a
body part, which makes speech visible. Hence, she stages a surprising contradic-
tion: While she claims an interrelation of speech and body, she also detaches the
voice from the body by ignoring the interior depths of the physical apparatus
that produces vocality.7
I suggest that Butler’s own performance of performativity is aimed at keep-
ing signifying processes and their effects, including their material effects, more
clearly legible. In her view, the mouth forms the threshold and draws a boundary
between interior and exterior, materiality and intelligibility, nature and culture, a
boundary that positions her thinking. While her reflections on bodily speech
begin with a notion of physical process, her interest remains firmly situated on
the product of the process, which is the meaning produced by discourse. The
body exceeds and disrupts its speech act, but Butler also binds it back to the
economy of signification, when she writes: ‘speech itself is a bodily act with spe-
cific linguistic consequences’ (Butler, 1999: xxv; my emphasis). While this is
undoubtedly true, my point here is the binding of the analytic energy to the
intelligible. The repeated acts of the body produce meaning, including the mean-
ing of gender, in the form of visible-as-legible effects. Legibility, however, as a

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 Do Voices Matter? & 43

visible product of discourse once more confounds the videocentric power of

logocentrism that Cavarero so convincingly lays out. Thus, Butler’s theory of
performativity manifests what Fred Moten describes (in writers such as Derrida,
Lacan, and Edelman) as ‘an occlusion (of sound) that occurs sometimes in the
name of a deconstruction of phonocentrism and always within a tradition of
logocentrism, which has at its heart a paradoxically phonocentric deafness’
(2003: 185). Ironically, Butler’s Derridian heritage, which cautions her against
the risk of phonocentrism and of voice fetishism, might have motivated her to
throw out the physical baby with the metaphysical bathwater, thereby binding
her to a logocentric tradition that cannot elevate the (sonic) sensible to the level
of the intelligible. Voice, however, cannot be clearly positioned as either sensible
or intelligible; it is not necessarily contained by culture or nature. A consider-
ation of the vocal body will therefore allow us to re-open the question of the
relation of the biological and the cultural, the somatic and the symbolic in the
production of bodies and subjectivities.

Track 4: Voices That Matter, or Resoundings

The notion of vocality should matter in a theory of gender performativity since,
as John Durham Peters states, voice is ‘a site where sexual differentiation is most
clearly and most routinely accomplished’ (2004: 88). While within the normative
regimes of gender, the voice might appear as thoroughly naturalized, Durham’s
phrasing already indicates that the sound of the voice can be understood as a cul-
turally framed physical accomplishment rather than as a biologically fixed
expression of gender. As feminist linguistic research since the 1970s has shown,
there are no ‘basic differences in male/female intonation patterns in English,
which are exclusively one or the other’ (Key, in Hendricks, 1998: 115). Gender
differences in the use of the voice, such as pitch and timbre, are rather socially
formed than anatomically determined. Even the change in boys’ voices during
puberty as a result of hormone changes is not fully explained by biology alone.
Cusick, for instance, argues convincingly that while hormonal changes signifi-
cantly affect boys’ vocal chords, their vocalization becomes ‘a behavior that is
compulsive without being compulsory’, motivated by a configuration of biolo-
gical and cultural requirements. Cusick writes:
there is nothing in the physical change of events that requires a young boy to abandon the
register that he might share with young girls when he accepts his new access to the registers
called Tenor and Bass that would perform his identity as a man. Yet in late twentieth cen-
tury North-American culture nearly all boys enthusiastically abandon the register they
might share with girls, choosing instead to re-learn the interior bodily performances
required to produce a manly lower register for Speech. Thus, they learn to perform their

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44 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 1

biological difference from girls, and their successful passage to adulthood with their every
utterance. (1999: 33)

Studies on the perception of the voice, or the listening position, support

such a denaturalization of vocal sexual differences. Thus, performance scholar
and teacher Pamela Hendricks argues that vocalization in itself does not pro-
vide enough information to the listener to communicate gender: ‘Only when
voice and gesture are combined and repeated in more detailed patterns do they
result in an impression of ‘‘masculine’’ and ‘‘feminine’’’ (1998: 116). In her
excellent study of the racialization of the singing voice, in particular the timbre
or ‘color’ of the voice, musicologist and voice artist Nina Eidsheim makes it
perfectly clear that the interrelation of visual and acoustic perception is
the reason that racially essentialist accounts of the voice are so persistent.
Eidsheim concedes that bodily constitution plays an important but limited
role in the shaping of vocality. Yet, a wide range of research on the topic sup-
ports the claim that on the one hand the ‘expressive and timbral ranges of the
vocal apparatus are larger than the variations we ascribe to physical differ-
ences’ (2008: 39), while, on the other hand, there are ‘no more common biolo-
gical vocal characteristics between individuals from the same ethnic group
than there are between members of different ethnic groups’ (2008: 118).
Eidsheim’s insightful discussion of recent scholarship on timbre results in a
brilliant theory of ‘performative listening’. She conveys brain research that
shows how a listener’s identification of a sound source through hearing is
based on incomplete information, for which the brain compensates. Visual ele-
ments frame this process of supplementation, which turns the perception of
timbre into a form of ideological auditory practice:
a source is heard according to schemas of racialized, gendered or otherwise categorized bod-
ies in accordance with the values of the given society ... (In turn), the sound as so perceived is
considered evidences (sic!) of the existence of these categories. (Eidsheim, 2008: 178)

Such a schema also disciplines the vocal performer, who unconsciously

attunes her performance to social norms by trying to comply with the idea of
a particular ‘ethnic’ voice. Eidsheim’s concluding suggestion to understand voice
as a material ‘technology of self’ embedded into various intersecting discursive
regimes offers a starting point for integrating vocality into a theory of gender
as performative accomplishment. However, such a proposition needs to
acknowledge the mediation and modulation of the voice through sound technol-
ogies. Contemporary listening experiences are significantly shaped through
sound media, i.e. these media impact our perception and knowledge of the
voice.8 In response to enjoying a Pink Floyd album, media scholar Friedrich

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 Do Voices Matter? & 45

Kittler illustrates how the sound system allows for the illusion of an immediate
perception of the music, a reduction of acoustic space:

The ‘sound of music in my ear’ can exist only once mouthpieces and microphones are capable
of recording any whisper. As if there were no distance between the recorded voice and lis-
tening ears. As if voices traveled along the transmitting bones of acoustic self-perception
directly from the mouth into the ear’s labyrinth, hallucinations become real. (1999: 37)

As Sterne (2003a) argues in his influential history of listening technologies,

The Audible Past, the practice of listening has been shaped through various cul-
tural processes that involved sonic technologies from mediate auscultation to
high fidelity and mp3 players. Sterne argues that sonic technologies in conjunc-
tion with such discourse–practices as philosophy, medicine, disability education
and music first of all established sound as an object (of knowledge). The shift in
understanding sound from technologies based on the mouth (telephone) to those
related to the ear (phonograph) resulted in a new understanding of sound and
practices of sound reproduction insofar as the model of hearing could conceptua-
lize sound regardless of its source. Hence, sound became the general category of
acoustics. Furthermore, the sonic machines of the 20th century significantly
changed the practice of listening itself as well and consequently impacted scien-
tific understanding of the body, of perception, and of social and cultural rela-
tions. The use of the stethoscope, for instance, led to a notion of the body as
an acoustic space that can be known through a technologically enhanced listen-
ing act, which also changed the spatio-physical relations between doctor and
patient. In other words, those modern media technologies affected ways of
knowing as well as sociality in western modernity.
That the voice as produced by and perceived through various technological
systems has been indispensible to a wide range of Western cultural production
beyond music is the argument at the heart of Weheliye’s Phonographies.
Weheliye interrogates the ‘numerous links and relays between twentieth-
century black cultural production and sound technologies such as the phono-
graph and the Walkman’ (2005: 3). Claiming the centrality of ‘sonic blackness’
as well as black culture to western modernity, Weheliye detects the significance
of sound and its technologies not only in musical works but also in theoretical
and literary texts, e.g. W.E. DuBois, Ralph Ellison’s and Langston Hughes’s
writings, and a variety of films. His analysis of examination of ‘Sonic Afro-
Modernity’ demonstrates that the lively black cultural production of the
20th century has been made possible by ‘the advent of technological sound
recording embodied in the phonograph, (which) split sounds from the sources
that (re)produced them’ (Weheliye, 2005: 7).

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46 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 1

It is surprising that despite the wide research on the centrality of media

technologies to the production of modern subjects and knowledges, a great num-
ber of voice scholars do not account for sound technologies but prefer to present
the voice as a medium of an unmediated body. The technological conditions of
voicing and listening will frame the following return to Butler’s theory of perfor-
mativity, which aims at creating a space for the material voice. A paradox in the
performance of gendered bodies, singing voices emerge in important passages of
Butler’s texts – only to be repressed or reduced to the status of an ‘example’ that
illuminates the production of meaning through a vocal act as act of signification. I
want to imagine two listening acts to make those voices heard – voices that both
supplement and subvert the notion of performative gender.

Replay 1: The Visible Vocality of the Drag Performance

Through the famous example of drag, Butler establishes gender as an act of imi-
tation. She writes that ‘in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative
structure of gender – as well as its contingency’ (1999: 175; emphasis in original).
While her notion of the act of drag does not suggest a particular form of enact-
ment, we have already seen that the aural dimension of the body is not perceived
as one of the significant dimensions of corporeality; yet a voice must be hidden
somewhere in an audio-visual performance. Indeed, Butler would not be able to
hear a voice emanating from the performer’s body. In drag, at least in the perfor-
mance evoked by Butler, a performance that tries to create an illusion of gender
coherence, the performer does not exactly perform vocally because his voice
would disrupt the image of the coherence of femininity performed. While the
performer’s ‘visible body’ produces the gender of the performance, his or her
voice is not involved in the production. Instead of vocalizing, the performer
remains silent and lip-synchs, i.e. s/he visually performs the voice of the gender
being enacted, while the voice of this ‘other gender’ is emitted by a sound system.
Thus, the listener projects the voice that touches her onto the body of the per-
former as the one he wants to hear – according to the conventions of the drag
performance.
Within the drag scene evoked in Gender Trouble, the voice returns as an elu-
sive mark of gender. What we would hear is what Michel Chion in his ground-
breaking book on sound in film, The Voice in Cinema, has related as an
acousmatic voice, ‘a sound that is heard without its cause being seen’ (1999:
18). This acousmatic voice materializes a split between the visual and the sonic,
which, as Chion, inspired by Lacan, argues, equalizes a constitutive division of
the subject that the technology of sound film sutures but eventually also displays:
‘If the talking cinema has shown anything by restoring voices to bodies, it’s

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 Do Voices Matter? & 47

precisely that it doesn’t hang together; it’s decidedly not a seamless match’
(Chion, 1999: 126). Furthermore, Chion describes the subject’s attempts to suture
the visual and the sonic as a complex ‘structural operation (related to the structur-
ing of the subject in language) of grafting the non-localized voice onto a particular
body to the voice as its source. This operation leaves a scar ...’ (1999: 126).
Chion’s reflections on the fragmentation of the subject are helpful in reinter-
preting the different dimensions of the drag scene. It can make the audience
aware that the performer attempts to overcome that split at the heart of the per-
formance of gender through the practice of playback, a practice that ultimately
structures the scene of drag. As Chion remarks, ‘(in) playback there is someone
before us whose entire effort is to attach his face and body to the voice we hear’
(1999: 156), while this attempt at incorporation of the voice strives for ‘an impos-
sible unity’ (1999: 154). The alterity of the voice of drag has to be repressed in the
name of gender intelligibility. Chion’s notion of playback as effort to (re)unite
two separate dimensions of the visual and the aural supplements the theory of
performative gender insofar as the production of the ‘culturally habitualized cor-
respondence between body and voice’ (Fintner, 1997: 123) appears as an accom-
plishment that results from the labor of playback.9
But while the voice might work in conjunction with heteronormativity, it
also indicates the gendered subject’s potential to disrupt the illusion of coher-
ences. Gender as a practice of playback runs the risk of failure. The sonic can
work against a coherently gendered, intelligible body. We can now listen to the
voice as a voluntary or involuntary material site of the disruption of the repeti-
tive acts that produce normative subjects. Because of its potential to be disci-
plined by and to disrupt meaning, the voice can even become a site where
gender is naturalized and denaturalized at the same time. While functioning
within and through social regimes, for instance, the speaking voice might com-
municate normative ideas while also emitting the symptoms of resistance against
such regimes in the nonsensical vocal tics that Freud has discussed in various
instances.10 But even the material register of the voice alone might produce con-
tradictory performances of gender. Through the examples of the counter-tenor
Robert Harre-Jones and the drag queen Sylvester, Peraino makes the excellent
argument that a subject’s speaking and singing voices need not necessarily coin-
cide. While he sings a high tenor, Harre-Jones’s reciting voice is a baritone, so the
performer has ‘at least two voices’ that dispute each other: ‘the femininity of the
singing voice calls into question the masculinity of the speaking voice’ and vice
versa. The drag queen Sylvester, who during his performances occasionally inter-
rupted the singing in a falsetto voice to state in a deeper register that he can be
butch as well, serves as another example for the sexual difference inside one voice

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(Peraino, 2007: 60).11 Since a subject’s speaking and singing voice do not neces-
sarily function within the same register, one vocal body might provide the site of
a multiplicity of genders.
The theorizing of drag and the reflections on gender it enabled has been
made possible through the use of sound technology. A technological apparatus,
consisting of transducers in form of microphones and loudspeakers as well as
cables, plugs, a resonating space, etc. is involved in the vocal performances that
serve as examples of gendering and degendering. This technological apparatus
also frames the vocal performance of the drag scene Butler analyzes. In other
words, the drag scene is an assemblage of bodies and machines, in which the
voice of gender the audience listens to is a phonographic voice. Weheliye empha-
sizes the complex effects of a phonotechnology that delinks the sound of the
voice from its human source:
On the one hand, (the) disjuncture between sound and source rendered sound more ephem-
eral, since it failed to provide the listener with a ‘human’ visual point of reference. On the
other hand, sound gained its materiality in the technological apparatuses and practices sur-
rounding these devices and in the process rematerialized the human source. (2005: 7)

Butler’s theory of gender performativity does not seem to be able to deal

with the absence of a ‘human’ point of reference in the drag performance she
evokes. Choosing the mouth over the voice as indicator of the material body, the
writing remains attached to a visual body as the human body. As Butler denatur-
alizes gender identity, her thinking of the gendered body remains bound to a
‘natural’ body, or – at least – to its fully humanized figure manifested through
the visual. While Butler offers a convincing analysis and critique of phonocentric
conceptions of identity, the material performance of voice marks one of the lim-
its of her work, and the matter of technology functions as a ‘constitutive outside’
of the theory of gender performativity.
That the machinic voice as the supplement of the drag scene does not have a
place in her theory is unfortunate since the voice of the machine lends itself so
obviously to a denaturalization of gender by implying that (gender) identity
depends on discursive, material, technological prosthetics. In an illuminating
analysis of the effect of a modulator in Laurie Anderson’s vocal performances,
performance theorist Amelia Jones describes how Anderson’s ‘body/self is tech-
nologically performative’ (1998: 212). Not only do the technological voice
changes create shifts in the discursive position from ‘woman as object (to) man
as speaker’ (Jones, 1998: 211). Anderson herself also noted that ‘the various
modes of the modulator give her different things to say’ (Jones, 1998: 212).
Jones’s reading of Anderson’s vocal performances creates an insight into the
‘technologized, mediated nature of the experience of the body/ self’ (1998: 213;

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 Do Voices Matter? & 49

emphasis in original). Let me use these thoughts on the voice of Anderson’s

performance to come to a conclusion by returning to the opening act of this
essay, Butler’s utilization of Aretha Franklin’s song ‘You Make Me Feel (Like
a Natural Woman)’ and engage in a little audio-visual fantasy.

Replay 2: Who Makes Me Feel Like a Natural Woman?

When coming across Franklin’s voice, we are meant ‘to listen through (it) ... to
the message that Butler elaborates’ (Peraino, 2007: 60). There is, of course, much
more to that voice. The constellation of the voice of a woman hailing Butler’s I as
the ‘you’ that makes her feel ‘natural’ produces an interesting sexual indetermi-
nacy: On the one hand, we might assume a lesbianization of the caller, ‘Aretha’.
But on the other hand, the ‘natural woman’ in African-American slang signifies,
as Peraino explains, the straight woman. However, Butler’s discussion of the
problems of a natural femininity may shift, when we consider the history of
ideologies of racialized gender, which disallowed Black women the status of
‘natural women’. Then, Franklin’s enunciation could be understood as an
accomplishment in the face of racist disenfranchisement. Visualizing the scene,
in which Butler is listening to the voice of a Black woman hailing a white woman
as her ‘naturalizer’ – we also have to wonder what kind of racial desire, what kind
of racial fantasy the voice induces. However, the focus of interest here is the
source of the voice.
The voice so intimately named ‘Aretha’ is a voice, which, as I imagine, is
coming towards Butler, the listener, from a loudspeaker. Indeed, the intimacy
with all its burdensome meanings emerges within a human machine assemblage.
So, what does it mean that the voice that touches Butler is the voice of the
machine? Does the intimate relation between the machine and its listener recon-
figure the meaning of the scene, the effect of the vocal act? If we assume – via
Emile Benveniste – that the ‘I’ is a linguistic shifter and refers not to any precon-
ceived identity but constructs the source of utterance in the moment and space of
the utterance (Benveniste, 1996), then it is indeed the machine situating itself in
the place of the ‘I’, sharing the speaking position with the singer and evoking a
desiring relationship to the one who listens to the voice. The achievement of
being naturalized, then, does not necessarily require a ‘differentiation from the
opposite gender’, as Butler writes, or from the unspoken racial other but also
from the machine. Franklin’s ‘original’ voice, produced as ‘original’ only
through the process of phonography, overlaps with the demand of the machine
to be naturalized and to hail the human figure as the authority of its naturaliza-
tion. In that sense it allows for a ‘humanization’ of the human listener.

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50 & Body & Society Vol. 17 No. 1

Finally, it also alerts us to the unspoken technologies of gender at the heart

of the discourse of performativity, technologies that erase the distance between a
voice and its listener, so that the thinking of denaturalization through Aretha
Franklin’s vocal performance becomes possible for the thinker. The voice in But-
ler’s ear that finds its way into her texts only in its dematerialized form suggests,
then, that ‘the post human’, in the form of a human body sound machine assem-
blage, might have been a condition of possibility of the discourse of gender per-
formativity right from its conception as a form of resistance against phonocentric
notions of identity.

Notes
1. Among the critics of Butler, Kath Weston notes that focus on visuality. She acknowledges that the
‘theatrical and contractual metaphor’ of visuality might be illuminating but cannot carry the weight of
all that theory leaves unexamined.’ (p. 71). While I agree with the observation of the dominance of the
visual, which represses other sensual fields, Weston’s analysis significantly differs from mine in that for
Weston the unexamined of ‘performance theory’ is ‘time’. This line of inquiry also leads her to an inap-
propriate critique of Butler for her interest in the materiality of the body (as opposed to a Marxist mate-
rialism), while I am obviously interested in the question of the materiality of the voice as aspect of the
body.
2. For Lacan and Dolar this voice is ph-sonic. However, we do not have to dematerialize it com-
pletely in order to perceive the paradox.
3. For an analysis of the relation of vocal regimes and the production of gender in modern Japan,
see Inoue (2003).
4. Peraino provides some excellent observations about the loss of voice in Butler’s theory of gender
performativity but does not proceed to a deeper analysis of her work. Her interest is the vocal drag of
pop music in particular.
5. For further critiques of Derrida’s reduction of the voice to self-presence, see Dolar (2006),
Kittler (1999), and Moten (2003).
6. The discourse of feminine madness, very popular in the 1970s and 1980s, offers one of the per-
haps most dramatic deployments of the metaphors of speech and silence but the notion of voice was of
general interest in those decades. In her influential study The Female Malady, a cultural history of
women’s madness, where the madwoman comes to epitomize women’s lack of social and cultural
authority and their lack of self-representation, Elaine Showalter summarizes the feminist diagnosis
of male and female subject positions in the tradition of western culture in the following way: ‘women,
within our dualistic system of language and representation, are typically situated on the side of irra-
tionality, silence, nature, and the body, while men are situated on the side of reason, discourse, culture,
and mind’ (1987: 4–5).
7. See also Duncan’s remark that in Butler’s theory of performativity the voice ‘remains unattached
to the body’ (Duncan, 2004: 294).
8. A contemporary example is the discussion about how young people’s use of mp3 players has led
to their appreciation of a ‘low fidelity’ sound as the ‘new great’. In his 2003 essay on the mp3 Sterne
(2003b) described it as a device that disciplines the activities of the human ear since it does not utilize
the full range of human hearing.

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 Do Voices Matter? & 51

9. Anthropologist Tom Boellstorff (2003) utilizes the notion of ‘dubbing culture’ for a cultural
translation of Western lesbian and gay identities into an Indonesian context. The rethinking of dub-
bing allows him to see the transformation in a mass mediated environment and to conclude that the
translations and modifications also transformed the context itself.
10. For an interesting discussion, see Dolar’s (2006) chapter on ‘Freud’s Voices’.
11. For an extended analysis of queer voices, see Peraino’s work (e.g. Peraino, 2006).

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Annette Schlichter is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California,

Irvine. Her research and teaching interests are feminist and queer theories, contemporary American
Literature, theories of performance and performativity, and histories and theories of voice. She is the
author of a German-speaking study on the figure of the madwoman in feminist critiques of represen-
tation and the coeditor of a German collection on feminism and postmodernism. She is currently
completing a book project, which examines the material voice in, or rather its absence from, recent
feminist theories of embodied subjectivity [email: aschlich@uci.edu].

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