Abstract
This chapter offers some reflections on the social and cultural relevance of vocal identity in the embodiment of queer subjectivities through a reading of Kim Fu’s 2014 novel For Today I Am a Boy. The coming-of-age story of Peter Huang, a young Canadian of Chinese descent who undertakes the slow and painful journey from boy to woman, is mapped out through a web of intertextual references that this contribution aims at unravelling. The starting point is the title of the novel itself, a direct reference to the eponymous song by Antony Hegarty. Choosing the song as a privileged “point of hearing” for Peter’s story allows this contribution to trace the emergence of different vocal positionings to emerge, in the novel as well as in wider elaborations of queer positionalities.
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Notes
- 1.
Pronouns are a sensitive issue in transgender identity politics: Kim Fu ’s novel does not address them directly, as the use of a first person narrator reduces references to the main character as he/she to a minimum. In discussing the novel, I will use the male pronoun for the main character when I discuss passages from the novel before the character starts her transition; for passages coeval and following this moment I will use the female pronoun.
- 2.
I am borrowing this expression from Adriana Cavarero’s well-known insight on sound, and particularly the human voice, as a relational positionality opposed to the all-encompassing economy of the visual (Cavarero 2005, 121).
- 3.
Fort Michel is the name with which the place is referenced in the novel, although the town in Ontario is actually spelled Fort Mitchell. This makes Peter’s hometown an imaginary as well as a material place: the new name more explicitly expresses the negotiation between English (Mitchell) and French (Michel) in Canada, and thus references to the main character’s own cultural predicament as a Canadian person of Chinese descent.
- 4.
For example, see the opening sequence of the film Transamerica , which shows a voice training tutorial video for M to F transition: rather significantly, the only complete phrase—among many vocalizations—used to try out different inflexions in order to find the perfect voice for the newly gendered body is “This is the voice I want to use” (see Transamerica, dir. Duncan Tucker, USA 2005).
- 5.
Yet, both McGeary (2000) and Helen Berry in her biography of the castrato Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci, who in 1765 eloped with an Irish girl from a wealthy family, convincingly argue that castrati were not just emasculated men who transgressed into femininity. More dangerously, they elaborated an alternative masculinity where their physical deficiency could be compensated by other qualities such as honour, reputation, and artistic taste—an emerging paradigm in the Georgian period, “a kind of polite masculinity to which castrati not only subscribed but acted as admired cultural leaders” (Berry 2011, 70).
- 6.
For a thorough history of castrati in European theatres see Heriot (1956).
- 7.
More recently, male altos have starred in the early music revival, a performance movement mostly stemming from Elizabethan and Restoration musical practices. Today, the rediscovery of early music has become a global phenomenon in Western classical performance, with more than one generation of singers—now called “countertenors” rather than the more culturally tainted “falsettists”—bringing the male high voice on the forefront of celebrity classical singing. For a thorough history of the movement see Haskell (1996).
- 8.
Here I am purposefully not taking into account musical discourses that distinguish between falsetto and head voice as two different ways of producing a higher vocal pitch in men. This distinction is in itself controversial (see e.g. Ravens 2014, 11), and rests on the centuries-old disparaging of falsetto as inauthentic and effeminate. Moreover, even if applicable, this is a distinction that would not be necessarily perceptible to the untrained ear, and as the chapter moves into the realm of pop music this will become a major issue in my argument.
- 9.
This connection between castrati and contemporary pop icons is drawn in the documentary Heavenly Voices, to which I worked as consultant alongside singer and performer Ernesto Tomasini. Although this contribution veers towards different textualities, I want to thank Ernesto for the inspiring exchanges we have had through the years, and for sharing with me his priceless insights on the issues of voice pitch and identity (gendered and otherwise) that he has been exploring in his performances; see Heavenly Voices, dir. Gino Pennacchi and Alessandro Scillitani, Germany 2013.
- 10.
This approach resonates in the use of gendered pronouns for this artist, which has recently witnessed a notable shift. Antony has apparently never dictated any policy in this respect, and Hodgman does indeed use the male pronoun in his 2005 interview; yet in the recent controversy over her refusal to attend the 2016 Academy Awards ceremony the artist, under the gender-unspecific name of Anohni, is consistently referred to in the feminine in the press covering the issue (see e.g. Finger 2016; Walker 2016). In the communication explaining her refusal to attend the ceremony due to the fact that she was not asked to perform, Anohni straightforwardly defines herself as “an androgynous transwoman ”, and ascribes her exclusion from the prestigious evening’s line-up to the “system of social oppression and diminished opportunities for transpeople that has been employed by capitalism in the U.S. to crush our dreams and our collective spirit” (quoted in Pitchfork 2006).
- 11.
Gallimard’s blindness to cultural specificities as regards “the Orient” is actually made fun of in the play; as he praises her “convincing” performance of Butterfly, the Chinese singer retorts: “Convincing? As a Japanese woman? The Japanese used hundreds of our people for medical experiments during the war, you know. But I gather such an irony is lost on you” (Hwang 1989, 17).
- 12.
Peter’s father, on the other hand, emancipates himself from the emasculated Asian male stereotype by endorsing an uncompromising masculinity he means to pass on to his son: this cultural self-fashioning includes both not allowing his children to learn Cantonese and taking a white mistress, in a landscape where the sexual politics of the Western nuclear family model tightly intertwine with the cultural clash experienced by Chinese migrants in North America.
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Guarracino, S. (2018). An Effortless Voice: Queer Vocality and Transgender Identity in Kim Fu’s For Today I Am a Boy. In: Baker, P., Balirano, G. (eds) Queering Masculinities in Language and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Language, Gender and Sexuality. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95327-1_7
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