QuietBob97 is an alaryngeal speaker who foregrounds prosthetic voices in a series of sound-only YouTube videos. With performances designed to retrain a listener’s ear for different voices, QuietBob aspires to dismantle the stigma of un-naturalness that places the humanness of his voice (and his self) in question. This essay reads QuietBob’s performative moves to develop a theory of crippled speech – the representational crippling of speech and the concomitant desubjectification that attends bodies of vocal difference. Working between crip theory and Foucault’s norm, crippled speech contributes to sound and disability studies a new paradigm for hearing and thinking vocal alterity.
An ideology of racial difference is baked into American music history. The staggering diversity of music heard in the sixteenth through nineteenth This colloquy began as an interdisciplinary workshop held at the University of Pennsylvania, October 11-12, 2019, sponsored by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the University of Pennsylvania Vice Provost Office, and the School of Arts and Sciences. Two participants published their essays elsewhere: Moriah, "'Greater Compass,'" and Fulton, "'Year of Jubilee.'" 1. Our thanks to
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