Deconstructing identity in/and difference: Voices “under erasure”

Abstract

Voices as distinguishing markers of individual expression have neither a direct nor simple relationship to the social interactions and self‐identities from which they arise. The foregoing WJC series places the notion of voice “under erasure,” critically interrogating the authorizing assumptions and disciplinary conventions whereby voices have come to represent pregiven, unitary identities in the production of communication scholarship. This essay explicates several complicating themes that emerge from the WJC series: the investments and possibilities of scholarly representations of voice; the embeddedness of voice in discursive practices that enable and constrain identity formation; and the usefulness of voice as an analytic trope for charting the material course of cultural ideologies during particular historical periods.