Haptic Aurality: On Touching the Voice in Drag Lip-Sync Performance

ABSTRACT

Lip-syncing is a ubiquitous phenomenon within the drag community. From high-femme queens to gender-queer club kids, lip-syncing is the drag queen’s modus operandi. Within this article, I will interrogate a particular claim made by one of London’s premier drag queens, the mononymous Rodent, in which they argue that an intensely high volume of sound is necessary to create a successful lip-sync performance. Using interview quotations from Rodent, I chart the importance of an immersive soundscape in lip-syncing, one that allows the drag queen to engage tactually with sound’s vibrations. Synthesising Rodent’s comments, I propose that they engage in a form of “haptic aurality”, drawing upon theories set forth by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as well as Laura Marks. Using this theory, I then argue that the reason haptic aurality results in a successful performance is due to the way in which it helps to suture the break between drag queen and loudspeaker, facilitating the reperformance, dramatisation, and extension of the processes of everyday speech, as set out by Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

KEYWORDS:

• drag queen
• lip-syncing
• haptic
• Merleau-Ponty
• Nancy
• performance art
• voice
• Deleuze
• Guattari
• queer

Notes

1. Sangita Gopal & Sujata Moorti, Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 23.

2. Laurence Senelick, The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 384; see also Carol Langley, “Borrowed Voice: The Art of Lip-Synching in Sydney Drag”, in Australasian Drama Studies, Volume 48 (April, 2006), p. 7.

3. Esther Newton, Mother Camp (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1972), pp. 44-46; Julian Fleisher, The Drag Queens of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide (London: Pandora, 1996), pp. 139-141.

4. Michelle Visage, interviewed by BUILD LDN, “Michelle Visage Talks Valentina from RuPaul’s Drag Race”, accessed on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgRvB-N571o.

5. It is necessary to note that Rodent, both in and out of drag, uses they/them pronouns; similarly, while according to the Oxford English Dictionary “themself” is not a formal singular of the numerically neutral “themselves”, here I will use it when referring to Rodent themself for the sake of clarity and in respect of their pronouns.

6. NB: some longer quotations have been streamlined for clarity.

7. It is worth noting that, for many queens, this feeling of singularity is not important: for example, drag performer Sue Gives-A-Fuck highlighted, in ethnographic interviews, the importance of dissonance and juxtaposition inherent, in her mind, to lip-syncing; similarly, Alec MacIntyre speaks of lip-syncing as parody and dissonance in the work of drag artist Cherri Baum, see Alec MacIntyre, Singing is a Drag: Gender, Voice, and Body in Drag Performance, Doctoral dissertation, University of Pittsburgh (2017), p. 79.

8. Performing in nightclubs as they do, one might imagine that this sound is regularly afforded to Rodent; however, as they describe, without a PA system and in certain smaller, more DIY settings, the sound systems can certainly be lacking.

9. Carol Langley, “Borrowed Voice”, p. 8.

10. Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 35.

11. Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2006), p. 89.

12. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 22; for a further discussion of lip-syncing with specific reference to de-acousmatisation, see Leila Riszko, “Breaching Bodily Boundaries: Posthuman (Dis)embodiment and Ecstatic Speech in Lip-Synch Performances by boychild”, in International Journal of Performances Arts and Digital Media, Volume 13, Number 2 (2017), p. 160.

13. Julian Henriques, “Sonic Dominance and the Reggae Sound System Session”, in The Auditory Culture Reader, eds. Michael Bull and Les Back (Oxford: Berg, 2003), p. 452.

14. Ibid., p. 452.

15. It is also worth noting Stefan Helmreich’s discussion of the potential “oneness, a sensory communion” of immersion, that, in Don Ihde’s words, can result in a “‘dissolution’ of self-presence”; while these comments are used to then further Helmreich’s conceptions of soundscapes and transduction, they assist in situating the unmediated engagement with sonic material Rodent describes, Stefan Helmreich, “An Anthropologist Underwater: Immersive Soundscapes, Submarine Cyborgs, and Transductive Ethnography”, in American Ethnologist, Volume 34, Number 4 (November, 2007), p. 624.

16. It is worth noting that some performers do make more sound than Rodent when performing. While Rodent may, at most, whisper the words beneath their breath, other performers actively sing out whilst lip-syncing, performing a type of duet, if you will, with the track.

17. Stefan Helmreich, “An Anthropologist Underwater”, p. 625.

18. Ibid., p. 631.

19. Luis-Manuel Garcia, “Beats, Flesh, and Grain: Sonic Tactility and Affect in Electronic Dance Music”, in Sound Studies, Volume 1, Number 1 (2015), p. 60; Julian Henriques, “Sonic Dominance”, p. 452.

20. Adriana Cavarero, For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, trans. Paul A Kottman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 7 & 3.

21. It is interesting to note that, while not relevant to this study, there is another important tactile and connective element in certain lip-syncing traditions, in which the drag queen touches the audience in accepting their monetary tips.

22. Steven Connor, “Edison’s Teeth: Touching Hearing”, in Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity, ed. Veit Erlmann (Oxford: Berg, 2004), p. 159.

23. Ibid., p. 160.

24. “Haptic aurality” is not my own coinage and has been used by theorists such as Lisa Coulthard and Franziska Schroeder in interesting, even if not mutually corroborative, ways. I see no issue in our differing applications of the term, as Deleuze and Guattari’s original theorisation of the haptic intentionally, and hopefully, leaves its plateau open to further interpretation.

25. Ana Maria Ochoa, Aurality: Listening & Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 22.

26. Indeed, it is due to the specific definitions of “haptic” I detail above that I understand this concept as different from “sonic tactility”, as theorised by Luis-Manuel Garcia. While Garcia does make specific use of the word “haptic”, I believe he uses the term intentionally in its more general sense, rather than in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, as is my reading, see Luis-Manuel Garcia “Beats, Flesh, and Grain”, p. 60.

27. Abbie Garrington, Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), p. 16.

28. Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans Brian Massumi (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1987), p. 557.

29. Ota Yoshitaka, “What is ‘the Haptic’?: Consideration of Logique de la sensation and Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation”, in The Japanese Society for Aesthetics, Number 17 (2013), p. 16.

30. Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 572.

31. Ibid., p. 572.

32. Ibid., p. 575.

33. Laura Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 12.

34. Ibid., p. 17.

35. Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 566.

36. Michael Heller, “Between Silence and Pain: Loudness and the Affective Encounter”, in Sound Studies, Volume 1, Number 1 (2015), p. 44.

37. Ibid., p. 45.

38. Ibid., p. 41.

39. David Novak, Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 46.

40. Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock (London: I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 1996), p. 106.

41. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 37.

42. Geoffrey Bennington, “In Rhythm: A Response to Jean-Luc Nancy”, in SubStance, Volume 40, Number 3, Issue 126: Plus d’un toucher: Touching Worlds (2011), p. 18.

43. Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), p. 25.

44. Originally, it seemed paradoxical that Rodent expels nothing in lip-syncing, not even releasing breath in a whisper; however, Rodent stated that often they do not expel any air, only “get[s] really taut in [their] core and facial muscles”. Indeed, when one attempts to lip-sync a belted note, it is considerably easier to choke the voice somewhat in the back of one’s throat and tense one’s stomach muscles. What this causes, therefore, is an essential out-of-syncness, one that can be seen to reflect the vibratory nature of sound and touch.

45. Mark Grimshaw, “Sound and Player Immersion in Digital Games”, in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, eds. Trevor Pinch & Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 350.

46. Frances Dyson, Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture (California: University of California Press, 2009), p. 7.

47. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, ed. Claude Lefort (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 133-134.

48. Sue L. Cataldi, Emotion, Depth, and Flesh: A Study of Sensitive Space, Reflections on Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Embodiment (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993), p. 61.

49. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 134; Sue Cataldi, Emotion, Depth, Flesh, p. 71.

50. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 144.

51. Édith Lecourt, “The Musical Envelope”, in Psychic Envelopes, ed. Didier Anzieu, trans. Daphne Briggs (Karnac Books: London, 1990), p. 215.

52. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 144.

53. Ibid., p. 144.

54. Ibid., p. 142.

55. Zeynep Bulut, “Theorizing Voice in Performance: György Ligeti’s ‘Aventures’”, in Perspectives of New Music, Volume 48, Number 1 (Winter, 2010), p. 55; Zeynep Bulut, La Voix-peau: Understanding the Physical, Phenomenal, and Imaginary Limits on the Human Voice through Contemporary Music, Doctoral dissertation, UC San Diego (2011).

56. Ibid., p. 147.

57. David Bissell, “Vibrating Materialities: Mobility-Body-Technology Relations”, in Area, Volume 42, Number 4 (December, 2010), p. 482.

58. Lisa Coulthard, “Haptic Aurality: Listening to the Films of Michael Haneke”, in Film-Philosophy, Volume 16, Number 1 (2012), pp. 16-29.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jacob Mallinson Bird

Jacob Mallinson Bird is a candidate for the DPhil in Music (Musicology) at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, where he holds a Graduate Scholarship (Arts). Previously, he received his MSt in Music (Musicology) from Wadham College, Oxford and his BA in Music from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Jacob’s thesis, entitled Becoming Queen: Voices, Bodies, and Technologies in Drag Lip-Sync Performance, theorises lip-syncing as a mode of voicing and also offers close analyses of specific performers and performances, with his work drawing significantly from the fields of psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and queer theory.