ANOHNI: The Grain of the Transgender Voice

Credit: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty

There is no particular ‘coming-out’ moment in singer-songwriter Anohni Hegarty’s biography. She was publicly referring to herself as transgender by 2010, but did not sign any press releases in her chosen name until she announced her break from band The Johnsons in February 2013.[1] From her work in the 90s with avant-garde drag theatre troupe Blacklips to her public adoption of feminine pronouns while working with the ‘Future Feminism’ project in 2012, Hegarty has always been singing from a position of gender variance. This essay is an enquiry into the interstices between Hegarty’s voice and transgender identity. Part one asks how she performs that relationship, and how critics have responded to it. Part two is a theorisation of the transgender voice, asking what it means to sing from such a position. Finally, part three is a close listening of Hegarty’s studio performance of ‘Bird Gerhl’, the final track from her 2005 album I am a Bird Now. 

1. ANOHNI in Context

‘I’ve been talking about myself as transgender for as long as I can remember’, she once stated in an interview.[2] The childhood narrative that she relays is one virtually untouched by the ‘crisis of [binary] definition’—Hegarty calls it a ‘sacred crisis’—espoused by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in The Epistemology of the Closet.[3] Far more ambivalently—and intersubjectively—Hegarty suggests that ‘the trans experience is an internalization of a crisis that our identities present for other people’; hers has been a life not of confusion, but of confusing others.[4] This statement should not be interpreted as indifference, however. While she speaks of ‘the joy and the mutability of gender, the mystery of gender’, Hegarty also speaks of the ‘importance’ of language: ‘“he” is an invisible pronoun for me’, she stated in one interview, ‘it negates me’.[5] For her, gender is simultaneously an ecstatic mode of expression and a ‘sacred’ reality that demands to be taken seriously.

Hegarty’s positive embracing of gender ambiguity maps onto her vocal production in manifold ways. Critics have described her ‘beautiful, quavering falsetto’ as ‘beguilingly high-pitched’, ‘liminal’, ‘ethereal’, and what ‘a radiant, healing crystal’ might sound like.[6] She is almost ubiquitously described as ‘androgynous’.[7] Ludovic Hunter-Tilney writes of a ‘voluptuous, baroque’ voice where ‘gender boundaries […] melt’ into ‘echoes of Boy George’s high tones and Nina Simone’s low ones’.[8] The comparison with Nina Simone is a particularly frequent one, which Hegarty seems to embrace. In an interview with Dazed magazine, she lists ‘the songs that made her the person she is today’, and Simone featured twice amid a genealogy of varied vocal gender expression, from Klaus Nomi’s highly affected countertenor, to Alison Moyet’s bluesy contralto, or Diamanda Galás’s avant-garde screams.[9] The racial politics of the Simone comparison are beyond the scope of this essay. Nevertheless, the combined overviews of Hegarty’s press reception and self-proclaimed influences suggest that: 

(1) Hegarty has curated her vocal style through the influence of an eclectic combination of singers whose vocal gender presentations often deviate from the norms of mezzo-soprano woman or baritone man;
(2) critics have focussed on the gender ambiguity of her voice in overtly sensuous terms of beauty and fragility; and
(3) Hegarty’s vocal performance hinges around this interplay of transfeminine production and reception. 

Just as she sees the trans experience as ‘an internalization of a crisis that our identities present for other people’, Hegarty’s gender, after a Butlerian performative fashion, is in constant state of becoming.[10]

Hegarty’s voice reifies her femininity through this sense of performative social contract with the listener. Any terminological slippage between ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ in this instance would misleadingly imply that she performs some sort of drag. It is this problem that catches Carolyn Abbate’s discussion of the film Mascara at an impasse between essentialist ‘sex’ and a deceptive framework of ‘masks that can be assumed’.[11] More importantly, to confuse performance and performativity is to miss Butler’s central point, which is that all gender, or rather everyone’s gender is performative. ‘Gender trouble’ is no more or less performative than normative gender, it is simply a transgression of the social expectations to which sexed bodies are bound. Treating performativity as a framework within which performance necessarily takes place facilitates an approach to sung gender expression and affectation without recourse to Abbate’s binary between essentialism devoid of agency and deceptive ‘masks’.[12] In light of this understanding, I will now approach Hegarty’s voice through the lens of Roland Barthes’s theory of the ‘grain of the voice’, asking how far and in what ways the transgender voice might transgress it. 

2. ANOHNI in Theory 

Put most simply, the ‘grain’ is the presence of the body in the action: ‘the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs’.[13] Discussing it in explicit relation to the singing voice, Barthes uses two recorded singers (Charles Panzéra and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau) as ‘ciphers’ for terms that he borrows from Julia Kristeva: the geno-song and the pheno-song.[14] Standing apart from the structural pheno-song, which is ‘everything in the performance which is in the service of communication, representation, expression’—arguably, the stuff of a normative language on music—the geno-song is: 

the volume [as in substance and presence] of the singing and speaking voice […] the voluptuousness of its sounds-signifiers [….] It is, in a very simple word […], the diction of language.[15]

As Ed White points out, Barthes seeks to do more than simply ‘change directly the language on music’.[16] Writing that he wishes to ‘change the musical object itself’, Barthes parrots the title of his earlier essay, ‘Change the Object Itself’, which aims to move Marxist discourse on from identifying latent ideology in language to sociolect, or in other words how ‘thick’ language is with its ‘presence’ and ‘meaning’.[17] The ‘grain’, the explicit presence of the body, is yet more vividly material than this thickness, and consequently more ontological; language can be more or less thick, but Barthes hears that ‘grain’ can, itself, be in a voice. When Barthes seeks to ‘change the object itself’, then, he is seeking a new text. That text, the ‘grain’, is ‘the very precise space of the encounter between language and a voice’, or even more precisely, as White suggests, ‘where language systems meet bodies’.[18] In light of this new, bodily text, ‘Bird Gerhl’ alone cannot be my object of study; by studying Hegarty’s performances, I am studying her body. 

The question of where my project departs from Barthes’s is a pertinent one. Fundamentally, Barthes’s insistence upon the presence of language in the ‘encounter’ falls short of recognising the ‘paralinguistic features’ that Serge Lacasse identifies through a portfolio of pop song case studies.[19] I will return to these in the following section. Furthermore, however, Barthes’s grain is not the grain of a trans voice, and, through my framework of performance within performative gender structures, I would argue that this matters. Barthes’s writing on the voice is sexual, for sure, in its evocations of ‘desire’ for the ‘body’ of the ‘grain’ and the ‘jouissance’ when it ‘comes’, but that desire is a mutely masculine one, described by Chih-Weh Chang as homoerotic.[20] Nevertheless, as Susan Stryker has demonstrated, a catch-all queer politics of desire conflates gender and sexuality and subjugates transgender studies, turning it from the study of ‘embodiment and subjectivity’—the ‘wedding of self and flesh’—towards one of fetishisation.[21]

The gender non-conforming body has been as frustrating for musicological attempts to theorise vocal androgyny as it has been tantalising; where transness has been invoked in musicology, sex, death, and monstrosity have tended to follow. Judith A. Peraino takes Marjorie Garber’s suggestion that Frankenstein is ‘an uncanny anticipation of transsexual surgery’ and extends it the The Rocky Horror Picture Show.[22] Of Barthes’s S/Z, Joke Dame writes that, ‘one can sympathise with the shock of Sarrasine’, who moves to murder his castrato lover Zambinella, then adds that ‘today the horror is replaced by a certain excitement’.[23] These competing anxieties and fetishisations are now twenty years old, yet there is scant recent musicological literature to quell them. In musicology, trans people have been ‘monstrous, supernatural, satanic forces’, ‘allegories for the split nation-state of Germany’, ‘feminine souls imprisoned in a man’s body’, ‘biologically male puppets’, ‘sculptures’, ‘low-lifes’, ‘deviant’, and ‘patched-together synthesisers’, but rarely human subjects with agency.[24]

On the contrary, Olivia Bloechl and Melaine Lowe write that ‘transgender critique addresses a multiplicity of differential power structures and their tangible operation on actual, rather than hegemonically ideal bodies’.[25] These ‘actual bodies’ that are trans people operating within ‘power structures’ are living, singing embracings of ambiguity. Hegarty speaks of ‘the joy and the mutability of gender’ in the same breath as its ‘crisis that our identities present for other people’; when pushed by interviewers to draw comparison between her Moog organ-playing and her transition, Wendy Carlos concedes only that both are ‘good barometers’ for the openness of listeners to ‘novel variations’.[26] When speaking for themselves, trans musicians envoice careful navigations of the gendered horizons that they exist within. While Abbate’s claim that ‘the one thing a transvestite cannot control is his or her voice’ superficially refers to pitch and timbre, her underlying erasure of trans envoicing must—urgently—be challenged.[27]

3. ANOHNI in Practice 

As I have suggested, Hegarty’s mode of vocal performance is a curated one through which she embodies a lineage of queer and feminist influence. ‘When I close my eyes and listen’, writes Peter Tabakis, ‘I hear the resurrection of Nina Simone’.[28] Nishant Shahani hears a temporal ambiguity between nostalgia and queer utopia in ‘Bird Gerhl’ that, to a certain extent, reflects this resurrective drive.[29] ‘It marks the mobilization of reflective nostalgia into an affective retelling of queer history’, he writes, ‘while constantly drawing attention to the pastness of the present’.[30] The placement of time prepositions in the lyrics, with ‘now’ tacked onto the ends of lines and ‘soon’ displaced into the middle of them, urges the song towards its climax at 2.51.[31] The blossoming dynamic trajectory of ‘Bird Gerhl’, from a near-silent opening to hammered descending piano bass-line and G-half-diminished chord played by the violins at 2.51, is matched by Hegarty’s emergent diction. Her opening lines are barely discernible; the word ‘a’ and the ‘d’ from ‘bird’ are lost altogether at 0.26, as if she is trying to move her mouth as slowly and little as possible. The pronoun ‘I’ is always, to varying degrees, obscured by held ‘nn’ and ‘mm’ sounds—she moves air over her vocal chords before opening her mouth. Open vowels are not indulged for the first verse, with the ‘r’ of ‘heart’ dwelt upon at 0.53 and the ‘n’ of hand at 1.02 (the final ‘d’ is lost, once more, to a near-motionless tongue). While the ends of lines are consistently shaken by the tight, quavering vibrato that Hegarty’s commentators have described as ‘fragile’, the words ‘hands now’ peter out into a whisper at 1.14.[32] In the second verse, when she sings, ‘searching for my wings’, the word ‘wings’ only becomes discernible when she has manifestly ‘found’ them at 1.37, when the melody shifts up a sixth (‘I’m gonna be born’). 

In his approach to the ‘paralinguistic features’ of recorded singing, Serge Lacasse splits oral sounds into four categories: 

1) Primary qualities analogous to Barthes’s ‘pheno-song’;
2) Qualifiers: specific modifications of primary qualities, such as whispering or falsetto;
3) Differentiators: modifications that encroach upon primary qualities and qualifiers, such as stammering; and
4) Alternants: language-free noises such as groans and sighs.[33]

One of the reasons why Hegarty’s commentators tend to describe her voice as ‘liminal’ is its defiance of such neat categories as these. Lacasse describes ‘primary qualities’ as ‘biologically determined’—manifestly untrue in Hegarty’s case (see above), and flying in the face of both transgender theory writ large and the work of such scholars as Nina Eidsheim on the cultural construction of the voice.[34] Hegarty’s falsetto seems intrinsically linked to the primary qualities of her voice, rather than a modification or ‘qualifier’ of it. 

The dropped consonants at the opening of this track, the way in which the last ‘l’ of ‘girl’ trails off into a tenuis ‘hh’ exhalation at 0.28, are all arguably differentiators. Nevertheless, to suggest that they somehow disrupt meaning is to sever the expression of the voice from the expression of the body. Barthes might argue that her inhalations at 0.39 and 0.42 are as much part of her (geno-)song as any other sound that she makes.[35] Drawing attention away from the text, he seeks to hear ‘the tongue, the glottis, the teeth, the mucous membranes, the nose’.[36] By moving her mouth so little, Hegarty paradoxically renders the presence of her body impossible to ignore. Her closed ‘mm’ and ‘nn’ sounds draw out the flow of their preceding lines, or trail them away into timbres to blend with accompanying strings. Her whisper of ‘hands now’ is a similarly blending gesture. 

Lacasse usually reserves the overt presence of the body for ‘alternants’. One of the clearest examples of an alternant in ‘Bird Gerhl’ is Hegarty’s warm sigh at 0.06, before which her lips audibly part. After she sings, ‘cos I’m a bird girl’, she makes a small, glottal sound (2.08), and her penultimate iteration of ‘bird girls can fly’ is followed by an aspiration, ‘huh’, at 2.35. These motions of breath, whether punctuating between lines or standing alone, are gestures of a process of living sound. The positive embrace of ambiguity and the ‘joy’ and ‘mutability’ of epistemology in the face of crisis that I wrote about at the end of the previous section apply as well here as they do to gender expression.[37] The gendered pun of Hegarty proclaiming herself a ‘bird’—Northern British slang for woman—is rendered paradoxically present yet unattainable by the temporal trappings of ‘now’ and ‘soon’ concretised on an immutable, recorded track. Nevertheless, this semantic content is so much less immediate than the sounds that she creates through her performance.

In her ‘language-free noises’, in rendering her very body audible, Hegarty accounts for herself.[38] The agency wrung so dry from trans narratives by musicologists in the 1990s lies latent in her every syllable. The grain of the transgender voice is more than the body in the voice as it sings, it is the affirmation that this body, one which denies brute categorisation, exists in a dynamic, lived reality that sounds and refuses to not be heard. Anohni sings a testimony to her sheer being, and to hear all these sounds—sighs, hums, quakes, whispers—as song, as one, is to hear geno-song: fragile, fleshy, human. 

Appendix 

I am a bird girl 

I am a bird girl 

I am a bird girl 

I am a bird girl now 

I've got my heart 

Here in my hands 

I've got my heart 

Here in my hands now 

I've been searching 

For my wings 

I've been searching 

For my wings some time 

I'm gonna be born 

Gonna be born 

Into soon the sky 

I'm gonna be born 

Into soon the sky 

Cause I'm a bird girl 

And the bird girls go to heaven 

I'm a bird girl 

And the bird girls can fly 

Bird girls can fly 

Bird girls can fly 

Bird girls can fly 

Bibliography 

Press

Beaumont-Thomas, B. (2016). Anohni, the artist once known as Antony Hegarty, on life beyond the Johnsons. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/apr/09/trans-singer-anohni-new-album-hopelessness [Accessed 19 Dec. 2017].

Bennett, K. (2015). "Why Is It Hard to Stand Up?": An Interview with ANOHNI. https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/r3zj3w/anohni-interview-2015 [Accessed 2 Jan. 2018].

Bulut, S. (2016). The songs that made Anohni. http://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/30777/1/the-songs-that-made-anohni [Accessed 19 Dec. 2017].

Empire, K. (2016). Anohni: Hopelessness review – a radical album for a time of crisis. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/may/08/anohni-hopelessness-review-antony-and-johnsons [Accessed 19 Dec. 2017].

Halperin, M. (2014). We Will All Howl: Antony Hegarty on the State of Transfeminism. http://flavorwire.com/489997/we-will-all-howl-antony-hegarty-on-the-state-of-transfeminism [Accessed 19 Dec. 2017].

Hegarty, A. (2013). News. http://antonyandthejohnsons.com/news/news.html [Accessed 1 Jan. 2018].

Hsu, H. (2016). A New Kind of Protest Song. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/02/hopelessness-by-anohni [Accessed 16 Dec. 2018].

Hunter-Tilney, L. (2016). Anohni, a troubadour for transgender rights. https://www.ft.com/content/93c586c4-178e-11e6-b197-a4af20d5575e [Accessed 19 Dec. 2017].

Isisgallery.org. (2009). Antony - The Creek. http://www.isisgallery.org/forthcoming_exhibitions/antony_hegarty_the_creek.html [Accessed 1 Jan. 2018].

Oppenheim, M. (2016). Antony Hegarty, the first transgender person to be nominated for an Oscar in 30 years. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/antony-hegarty-first-transgender-person-to-be-nominated-for-an-oscar-in-30-years-a6833096.html [Accessed 20 Dec. 2017].

Pareles, J. (2016). Anohni: Embracing a New Name, and Sound. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/arts/music/anohni-embracing-a-new-name-and-sound.html [Accessed 19 Dec. 2017].

Ryzik, M. (2009). Antony Hegarty, a Somber Singer, Reveals Different Colors Offstage. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/arts/music/19anto.html?ref=topics&_r=0 [Accessed 13 Dec. 2017].

Sturges, F. (2012). Antony Hegarty: 'It takes nerve to get through your sense of shame on-stage. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/antony-hegarty-it-takes-nerve-to-get-through-your-sense-of-shame-on-stage-7939045.html [Accessed 29 Dec. 2017].

Tabakis, P. (2016). Review: Anohni's Hopelessness. https://prettymuchamazing.com/reviews/anohni-hopelessness [Accessed 2 Jan. 2018].

Audio-visual

YouTube. (2018). Antony and the Johnsons - Bird Gerhl. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1pZgrk_WCw [Accessed 20 Dec, 2017].

Literature

Abbate, C. “Opera, or The Envoicing of Women”, Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. R.A. Solie (Berkeley, 1993), 225–58.

Barthes, Roland, trans. Richard Miller. The Pleasure of the Text. 1st American ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.

Barthes, Roland., and Stephen. Heath. Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana Press, 1987.

Bloechl, Olivia Ashley, Melanie Diane Lowe, and Jeffrey Kallberg. ”Introduction” in Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship: 1-34.

Butler, J. Gender Trouble : Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge Classics. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Chang, Chih-Wei. "Reading the Erotic Body of Roland Barthes's S/Z." Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature 46, no. 1 (2010): 25-60.

Dame, Joke. ‘Unveiled Voices: Sexual Difference and the Castrato’ in Brett, Philip., Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas. Queering the Pitch : The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology. 2nd ed. New York ; London: Routledge, 2006: 139-54.

Lacasse, Serge. ‘The phonographic voice: Paralinguistic features and phonographic staging’ in Amanda Bayley ed. Recorded Music: Performance, Culture and Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010: 226ff.

Natvig, M. (2006). I am a bird now: Iscenesettelse av androgyne stemmer i popmusikken. University of Oslo (Master’s thesis). https://www.duo.uio.no/handle/10852/27087 [Accessed 1 Jan. 2018].

Peraino, Judith A. ‘Synthesizing difference: the queer circuits of early synthpop’ in Bloechl, Olivia Ashley, Melanie Diane Lowe, and Jeffrey Kallberg. Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship. 2015: 287-314.

Peraino, Judith A. Listening to the Sirens Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig. ACLS Humanities E-Book. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Sedgwick, E. K.. Epistemology of the Closet. London: Penguin, 1994.

Shahani, Nishant. "'Between Light and Nowhere': The Queer Politics of Nostalgia." Journal of Popular Culture 46, no. 6 (2013): 1217-230.

Stryker, Susan. Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution. Second ed. Berkeley, 2017.

White, Ed. How to Read Barthes' Image-music-text. London: Pluto, 2012.

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[1] Hegarty, A. (2013). News. http://antonyandthejohnsons.com/news/news.html [Accessed 1 Jan. 2018].

[2] Pareles, J. (2016). Anohni: Embracing a New Name, and Sound. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/arts/music/anohni-embracing-a-new-name-and-sound.html [Accessed 19 Dec. 2017].

[3] Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. London: Penguin, 1994: 12; Oppenheim, M. (2016). Antony Hegarty, the first transgender person to be nominated for an Oscar in 30 years. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/antony-hegarty-first-transgender-person-to-be-nominated-for-an-oscar-in-30-years-a6833096.html [Accessed 20 Dec. 2017].

[4] Beaumont-Thomas, B. (2016). Anohni, the artist once known as Antony Hegarty, on life beyond the Johnsons. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/apr/09/trans-singer-anohni-new-album-hopelessness [Accessed 19 Dec. 2017].

[5] Ibid; Halperin, M. (2014). We Will All Howl: Antony Hegarty on the State of Transfeminism. http://flavorwire.com/489997/we-will-all-howl-antony-hegarty-on-the-state-of-transfeminism [Accessed 19 Dec. 2017].

[6] Sturges, F. (2012). Antony Hegarty: 'It takes nerve to get through your sense of shame on-stage. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/antony-hegarty-it-takes-nerve-to-get-through-your-sense-of-shame-on-stage-7939045.html [Accessed 19 Dec. 2017]; Oppenheim, 2016; isisgallery.org. (2009).  Antony - The Creek. http://www.isisgallery.org/forthcoming_exhibitions/antony_hegarty_the_creek.html [Accessed 1 Jan. 2018]; Ryzik, M. (2009). Antony Hegarty, a Somber Singer, Reveals Different Colors Offstage. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/arts/music/19anto.html?ref=topics&_r=0 [Accessed 13 Dec. 2017]; Hsu, H. (2016). A New Kind of Protest Song. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/02/hopelessness-by-anohni [Accessed 16 Dec. 2018].

[7] Hunter-Tilney, L. (2016). Anohni, a troubadour for transgender rights. https://www.ft.com/content/93c586c4-178e-11e6-b197-a4af20d5575e [Accessed 19 Dec. 2017].

[8] Ibid.

[9] Bulut, S. (2016). The songs that made Anohni. http://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/30777/1/the-songs-that-made-anohni [Accessed 19 Dec. 2017].

[10] For an extended discussion of the performativity of Hegarty’s voice, see Natvig, M. (2006). I am a bird now: Iscenesettelse av androgyne stemmer i popmusikken. University of Oslo (Master’s thesis). https://www.duo.uio.no/handle/10852/27087 [Accessed 1 Jan. 2018]; Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble : Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge Classics. New York: Routledge, 2006.

[11] Abbate, C. “Opera, or The Envoicing of Women,” Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. R.A. Solie (Berkeley, 1993), 257.

[12] Ibid, 257.

[13] Barthes, Roland trans. Stephen. Heath. Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana Press, 1987: 188.

[14] Ibid, 182.

[15] Ibid, 182-83.

[16] Ibid, 180.

[17] White, Ed. How to Read Barthes' Image-music-text. London: Pluto, 2012: 152.

[18] Barthes 1987, 181, emphasis in original; White 2012, 152.

[19] Serge Lacasse. ‘The phonographic voice: Paralinguistic features and phonographic staging’ in Amanda Bayley ed. Recorded Music: Performance, Culture and Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010: 227ff.

[20] Roland Barthes, ‘Voice’, in The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975): 67; Chang, Chih-Wei. "Reading the Erotic Body of Roland Barthes's S/Z." Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature 46, no. 1 (2010): 25-60.

[21] Stryker, Susan. Transgender History : The Roots of Today's Revolution. Second ed. Berkeley, 2017: 213.

[22] Peraino, Judith Ann., and American Council of Learned Societies. Listening to the Sirens Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig. ACLS Humanities E-Book. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006: 235.

[23] Joke Dame. ‘Unveiled Voices: Sexual Difference and the Castrato’ in Brett, Philip., Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas. Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology. 2nd ed. New York ; London: Routledge, 2006: 139.

[24] Peraino 2006, 239; ibid, 247; ibid 91; Abbate 1995, 228; Dame 2006, 236; Abbate 1995, 227; Judith A. Peraino. ‘Synthesizing difference: the queer circuits of early synthpop’ in Bloechl, Olivia Ashley, Melanie Diane Lowe, and Jeffrey Kallberg, Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship. 2015: 300.

[25] Bloechl, Olivia Ashley, Melanie Diane Lowe, and Jeffrey Kallberg. ”Introduction” in Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship: 34.

[26] Beaumont-Thomas 2016; Peraino 2015, 300.

[27] Abbate 1995, 256.

[28] Tabakis, P. (2016). Review: Anohni's Hopelessness. https://prettymuchamazing.com/reviews/anohni-hopelessness [Accessed 2 Jan. 2018].

[29] Shahani, Nishant. "'Between Light and Nowhere': The Queer Politics of Nostalgia." Journal of Popular Culture 46, no. 6 (2013): 1217-230.

[30] Shahani 2013, 1226.

[31] YouTube. (2018). Antony and the Johnsons - Bird Gerhl. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1pZgrk_WCw [Accessed 20 Dec, 2017].

[32] Bennett, K. (2015). "Why Is It Hard to Stand Up?": An Interview with ANOHNI. https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/r3zj3w/anohni-interview-2015 [Accessed 2 Jan. 2018].

[33] Barthes 1987: 182; Lacasse 2010, 225-31.

[34] Eidsheim, Nina Sun. "Sensing Voice." The Senses and Society6, no. 2 (2011): 133-55.

[35] Barther 1987, 182.

[36] Ibid, 183.

[37] Beaumont-Thomas 2016.

[38] Lacasse 2010, 225.