Having established why Town’s primary audience is so invested in the illusion narrative for drag, I can circle back to Riley Knoxx and Tatianna’s very serious celebrity impersonations and what voices do for these performances. To do this, I am deliberately reading Riley and Tatianna’s drag in a manner inconsistent with the prevailing interpretation among their primary audience. This is mostly for political reasons: I reject the illusion narrative because of its roots in assimilationist politics that reify values of the neo-liberal, white supremacist, colonialist, cis-hetero patriarchy. Instead, I opt for a queer interpretive frame, in which I take Riley Knoxx and Tatianna’s claims to womanhood seriously, at least within the space of the drag show. For the duration of the act, I understand both performers as having become women and, depending on the content of the number, as having become the celebrities whose appearance they take on.178 The recorded voice is instrumental in this process of becoming, as the act of lip-syncing makes the voice appear to have originated within the drag artist’s body, simultaneously disrupting conventional theories of acousmatic voices and bringing the changes in the body’s gendered appearance from the outside to the inside. This plays on understandings of gender as anatomy and voice as interiority.179 As such, it is the campy element in Tatianna and Riley’s otherwise serious drag. Through the act of becoming women and becoming celebrities for the drag show, the artists demonstrate that linking gender and voice directly to the body is highly problematic.
178 My interpretation of the Deleuzian concept of “becoming” (in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature) is based on the writings of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. In his work with indigenous South Americans, Viveiros de Castro takes seriously claims that, for example, putting on the skin of a jaguar allows a hunter to become a jaguar and, thus, take on a jaguar’s perspective. (“Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4/3: 469-488.) Instead of the Euro-centric, “culturally relative” anthropologist cop-out of stating that indigenous people simply “believe” they become jaguars by donning the jaguar skin, Viveiros de Castro takes the claims seriously as a critique of Cartesian and otherwise Euro-centric and colonialist beliefs in fixed identity.
179 See: Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice”; Cusick, “On Musical Performances of Gender and Sex.”
My political choice to take Riley Knoxx and Tatianna’s drag seriously (and thereby understand how they enact camp) does not entirely conflict with their primary audience’s understanding of how they are using voices. The illusion narrative and my interpretation of Town drag as a form of becoming both understand recorded voices to be something that a drag artist puts on as part of a costume.180 The approaches diverge in my suggestion that putting on Beyoncé’s recorded voice and dance moves, in addition to a wig, makeup, and gold leotard, allows Riley Knoxx to become Beyoncé for the duration of the act. If I were to voice this out loud at Town, people would probably assume I have had some sort of break with reality because notions of becoming (in the Deleuze/Viveiros de Castro sense) conflict so strongly with Western constructions of fixed identity that is tied to the body. It is the fluidity of becoming, as well as its uncoupling of identity from anatomy, that is disruptive to hegemonic ideologies that create fixity as reality and fluidity as madness.
But the “madness” of a serious belief in becoming can be generative and is not entirely foreign to the world of drag. Lady J Martinez O’Neal, a drag artist from Cleveland, puts it this way:
Drag is so much more than the act of crossing genders. Becoming a woman is probably the last thing I think about when doing drag. I like the idea that you can become any noun, really. You can transform the body by padding and constricting your own, you can layer on art forms on art forms on art forms by being a queen who does ballet, eats fire, and plays live music. You can come onstage as a pile of garbage and transform into a psycho clown slut and actually move people to feel something by playing out your Divine meets Pierrot story and then turn around to see the most inspiring performer staple gunning Donald Trump’s picture to someone’s arm. I guess what I’m saying is, drag is the best art form ever.181
Though drag at Town centers on crossing genders and becoming woman, rather than becoming
“any noun, really,” Lady J’s testament to the transformative power of drag is still relevant. The
180 Deleuze, Kafka; Viveiros de Castro, "Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.”
181 Jeremiah Davenport/Lady J Martinez O’Neal, Facebook (public post), 19 September 2016.
drag show is a space in which identity is fluid, and this fluidity is more than comic, carnivalesque reversals; as Lady J says, the transformative power of drag can “actually move people to feel something” if it is taken seriously.
So what happens if we take Town drag seriously? How does letting Tatianna and Riley Knoxx become Rihanna and Beyoncé change how voices and identities work in relation to bodies? Understanding how Rihanna and Beyoncé’s recorded voices work for drag queens at Town requires an understanding of how those recorded voices work as cultural objects on a larger scale, especially in relation to the singers’ identities. Here, Stiegler becomes useful again, as does Jonathan Sterne.182 In the introduction to The Audible Past, Jonathan Sterne deconstructs discourses that treat recorded voices as “disembodied,” as though the recording and playback apparatus has somehow stolen the voice from its person/body in order for the technology to masquerade as a human.183 Instead, Sterne notes that recorded voices exist in a negotiated relationship with technology, in which the person whose voice is recorded is vocalizing specifically for that purpose. The mechanical reproduction of the voice is consensual; there is no theft. Thus, the recording and playback apparatus might be better seen as extensions of the vocalist’s body or persona, rather than machines masquerading as human by stealing a voice.184 The recorded voice, then, is not functionally different from a voice heard live, but this still does
182 Stiegler, Technics and Time. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
183 It is important to note the similarities between the discourses Sterne deconstructs—discourses that position recorded voices as “disembodied”—and Ursula the Sea Witch’s appropriation of voice in The Little Mermaid, referenced earlier in this chapter. In this case, however, it is not one living being masquerading as another by stealing a voice, but a machine masquerading as human. The theme of theft is quite prevalent in discourses on recording and playback of voices. (Sterne, The Audible Past.)
184 Sterne, The Audible Past. See also: Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).
Stiegler, Technics and Time.
not answer the question of what a voice is sounding. When Beyoncé and Rihanna record songs, who is singing?