Abstract

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.

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