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xandromedovna(see this post for the rest of the paper)
Vocal grain and flaw disrupt overproduction to create space for queer identity. However, as the songasm showed, there is also queer space within the overproduced aesthetic itself. The overproduced aesthetic leads to narrative problems not just philosophically by undermining individuality, but also by creating narrative dissonances in the way these characters are supposed to sound. There are two ways in which these dissonances become manifest, and “authenticity” is undermined: the limits of Autotune technology and missing vocal grain cues. In the first season, there are several moments where the Autotune technology is pushed to its limits and thus exposes itself to the audience. In “Throwdown” when the New Directions perform “Keep Holding On” by Avril Lavigne, the range of the arrangement is very large, which creates an unnatural sound in the high tessitura of the background part. Because such high notes are very difficult to tune, the technology is doing more work to tune these voices, making it more audible (and somewhat grating). Similarly in “Bad Reputation” when Sue sings “Physical” with Olivia Newton-John in a remake of the video, her voice is more obviously autotuned because she is not a singer, and thus the technology has to try harder to put her in tune. The audience is alerted to this by a side-effect of the technology that could be likened to a piano attempting to approximate a glissando, which surfaces when a voice is particularly out of tune or not firmly on one note.
On the other hand, when voices are well-enough Autotuned as to be unnoticeable to the audience, it can cause issues when the audience could conceivably expect vocal flaw. In “Vitamin D” Rachel says, “you’re actually a good singer, Quinn… occasionally sharp, but that’s just because you lack my years of training.”[27] Ironically, the audience can only hear this information in the dialogue, because to us[q] she doesn’t sound sharp at all; she’s perfectly in tune like everyone else. It is a common conceit in the show—again stemming from salability of the songs out of context—that some of the performances we see are “rehearsals,” for example the first number performed by the New Directions, “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat” from Guys ‘N Dolls. The narrative is structured around this performance being a flop, but musically it is as flawless as any other. It is only the sloppy choreography and the faces made by the performers and Will that indicate something is wrong; we can’t hear the difference[r]. In fact, in later episodes, it gets so hard to identify which songs are just in rehearsal and which are actual performances that “rehearsals” are marked by prominently displayed sheet music when the rehearsal aspect is narratively important. In the “Mattress” performance of “Smile” by Lily Allen, for example, Finn’s reliance on the sheet music helps distance him from Rachel and the romantic implications of the performance. This both preserves his relationship with Quinn and maintains his heteroic integrity. Such distancing cannot be accomplished musically and still leave this song readily exportable.
As can probably be guessed from these examples, Glee combats these authenticity conflicts through non-aural cues both visually and in the dialogue. The show creates a discourse around the impossibility of vocal flaw in Rachel (conveniently forgetting the exception of “Laryngitis”), making space for Rachel to fail without compromising the acoustic world of Glee. In “Duets,” we receive a polished rehearsal by Finn and Rachel for the duet assignment, after which they agree, rather unenthusiastically, that they have the competition in the bag. They decide to throw the competition to allow new talent to emerge, and Rachel tellingly says “we have to find a way for me to lose a singing competition.” They don’t accomplish this through attempting to introduce vocal flaw into her routine, because they’ve already made the joke that such a tactic is not an option; instead, they pick a song so offensive that no one would dare let them win. Similarly, in “Choke,” Rachel’s failure in her NYADA audition is not through vocal flaw, but through messing up the lyrics; the acoustic world is never compromised. This strategy is most evident in “Blame It on the Alcohol,” where the [sic] Rachel’s lack of vocal flaw is graciously extended to the other drunk characters in the episode. Blaine and Rachel, then Will and Shannon Beiste (Dot-Marie Jones) give drunk karaoke duets, but neither pair exhibits the vocal grain associated with intoxicated people. The scenes rely on visual markers of drunkenness and the singing of a drunken crowd to give the impression of intoxication instead of its auditory manifestation. Again, the acoustic world is left intact.
On the surface, there is nothing inherently queer in this strategy: there is no narrative subversion, nor a resistance to technology. However, the performative masking and unmasking of vocal flaw and vocal grain itself can be understood as creating a queer space. What’s odd about this is that no subject seems to be doing the performing; the show itself is taking up sonic identities at will. But what is the nature of the show’s “subjectivity?” Because Glee engages in several discourses of queerness and layers of performative signification, the show seems to be functioning as a fruitful example of that most queer of beings, the cyborg, in its embrace of multiplicities and contradictions.
Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” theorizes ways that cyborgs could be seen as a space for queering subjectivity. The cyborg is rooted in the tradition of blasphemy, which emphasizes community but not group policing, and is inherently ironic[28]. It is “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.”[29] In terms of gender and sex(uality), the cyborg is an anti-heterosexist and anti-gender binary being, because cyborgs do not require heterosexual coupling or sex for reproduction[30]. The cyborg has no use for the myth of original unity and heterosexual reunification; it is a disjunction. The cyborg’s inherent fluidity, liminality, and transience make it for Haraway the ideal queer subject.
The cyborg, then, is always already queer in its existence outside of a sexualized space and therefore transgressive of sex/gender boundaries when also crossing boundaries of human/machine. But it also crosses boundaries of subjectivity and stable identity. Stable identity and subjectivity are destroyed by cyborg authorship because in enacting several liminalities at once, the binary system falls apart.[31] In other words, “cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism.”[32]
Jarman-Ivens has taken this queer cyborg subjectivity a step further, articulating a queerborg (queer cyborg) vocality. In her analysis of The Carpenters, she notes how in attempting to tame the vocal grain the body is erased and replaced by technologized voices, making such technologically-mediated performances examples of the cyborg. “If,” she argues, “external technologies are always present in the making and distribution of music, but are variably visible […], the ‘visibility’ of the external technology involved necessarily has an impact on the perception of any human/machine fusion.”[33] She takes Haraway’s point about the cyborg’s lack of origin story and relates it to her psychoanalytic framework of the pheno-song and geno-song, articulating another queer layer in the cyborg in that by fracturing identity and subjectivity it creates the illusion of reunification.[34] In Glee, that reunification is the overproduced aesthetic.
The deployment of cyborg subjectivity, then, is a form of drag, and like all drag, is predicated on illusion and play: “the illusion is never really an illusion, but a suggestion of one, just as the drag queen never really passes as a woman but instead gestures toward the imitation.”[35] The previous quote requires some unpacking, because passing is an important project for the cyborg. As was argued earlier concerning the Myth of Spontaneity, realness is also a drag project. But for Jarman-Ivens’ conception of drag, realness is an incoherent term, because drag is only possible as a satire of or imitation of gender instead of an aspiration toward not being read as an imitation. However, in some ways realness is the aesthetic of drag; it is the pursuit of realness that makes the drag project legible. In this sense, Jarman-Ivens is noting that realness is the gesture towards imitation instead of an actual ability to pass. However, with the rise in prominence of trans* identities, passing has a certain currency in drag circles, and “fish”—a male’s ability to be read as female in such a way as to hide the technologies erasing the male body—has become an accepted drag tradition[s]. In that sense, Jarman-Ivens’ prohibition of fish through her assertion that the drag queen never really passes as a woman seems unnecessarily exclusive and limiting to drag’s theatrical possibilities.
As mentioned, fish is a vital project for the cyborg’s drag aesthetic, because the context for its drag is different than that of human drag royalty. The drag performance or drag ball is a constrained space contextualized as explicit theater, allowing the audience to leave this space with the comfort of knowing it was all in jest and that the questions these “performers” ask about gender and sexuality are no threat to their everyday lives.[36] The cyborg, to be allowed to exist by the dominant culture, also needs to reinscribe human gender and sexuality norms, but cannot utilize the traditional drag strategy of announcing its gender play because its intersectionality as queer and inhuman marginalizes it from this discourse. It therefore relies on fish to accomplish its drag project. It appropriates and plays with the gender and sexuality cues used by humans but hides the technologic production of these methods as a fish aesthetic. The success of this project relies on the ability of a cyborg to pass as human, or to give the illusion that there is an unmediated body (“meatsuit”) performing: “meatsuit realness.”
Meatsuit realness might appear to be the opposite of how Haraway imagines cyborgs should function. Haraway’s cyborgs “insist on noise and advocate pollution,” and yet meatsuit realness idealizes seamlessness and clean integration— unity, if you will— between human and cyborg.[37] But there are two potential assuaging responses to this dilemma. First, Haraway’s cyborg relishes contradiction and blasphemy, so presumably this blasphemy also extends to her myth of the cyborg. Second, drag itself is a form of gender: it adopts these codes that have phallogocentric origins yet makes no claim to them as a first language, in true cyborg fashion. The more damning criticism is that fish, and therefore meatsuit realness, seems to search for an original unity with the performed gender/chemical composition, a project of no interest to the cyborg.
This is all the more pressing when we consider that in Glee and the post-Believe pop industry, the creators of these products don’t necessarily want their consumers to see the cyborg. One must, however, divorce the creator from the creation, as with any piece of art[t]. The cyborg creation unmasks itself at will, regardless of the intentions of the creator, because there is no original unity between the two (assuming there even is a creator; Haraway is unclear as to what the origins of the cyborg exactly are if not an original unity). The cyborg product does not emerge from any carbon-based womb-like place; it is never physically part of the creator, and therefore has no context or reverence for the creator’s intentions. Whether or not the creator intended to reveal or disclose the cyborg, perhaps by clinging to the Myth of Spontaneity, is irrelevant; the queerborg possibility of meatsuit realness is in its very existence as a technologically-mediated thing and the continual threat of its unveiling[38]. Luckily, the methods of its exposure are many.
In Glee, perhaps the more playful of these methods is overlay, of which there are two types: temporal compression and superimposition. Film and television, as recorded media, are not bound by physical temporality as directly as, say, theater. This makes it possible for what would be consecutive live performances to take place onscreen simultaneously, compressing the time span into that of one number. The “Defying Gravity” diva-off is a great example of this type of overlay, as Kurt’s and Rachel’s voices weave among each other and create a duet where there were actually two solos. We know Kurt and Rachel aren’t singing simultaneously in the diegesis due to the lack of harmonic interplay between them that is typical of duets, and the cinematography clues us in by intercutting shots of Kurt singing then shots of Rachel singing. In fact, there is a shot at the first “and you won’t bring me down” where Kurt, singing, looks over at Rachel, who is watching his performance. And yet, this very intercutting between synchretic lines by Kurt then Rachel collapses these two performances of the same song into one whole presentation made of bits and pieces from each individual performance. The queer implications of this performance have already been discussed, but there is an added sense of unity between the two because Kurt and Rachel combine to form one multigendered solo voice.
Because the overproduced aesthetic erases the body, the voices can also be superimposed on other bodies, or several bodies at once, for certain narrative effects. There is a scene in “Laryngitis” where Rachel and Lauren Zizes (Ashley Fink)—who at this point has not joined the New Directions and is head of the AV club—bug the choir room because everyone is moving their mouths in rehearsal but half of them aren’t actually singing.[39] According to Rachel’s logic, there is no way to prove that no one else is singing except through appeal to technology. Zizes records a warm-up for Rachel, who plays it back with the voices divorced from their bodies on a complicated-looking technological apparatus. The apparatus tells her what she already knew: that some of the humans are not vocal sources; indeed this cyborg is the only reliable vocal source in this situation, except perhaps Rachel. We may safely call this apparatus a cyborg and not a robot because it seems to be in control of the shot sequence in which we see Rachel discover this information, exercising agency in its choice of bodies. The warm-up is recorded and we see the three-way alliance between Rachel, the apparatus, and Zizes. Rachel stops the tape, rewinds, and we get a shot of Rachel and only her singing, with timbral qualities implying this is not as played back through the machine. Cut to Rachel listening to the apparatus play back her voice, then a shot of Finn singing to the same playback recording of Rachel’s voice. Cut to Rachel scribbling names, pausing the tape, then Santana, Brittany, and Quinn singing with the voice of Rachel through playback, intercut with shots of Rachel listening and scribbling. By overlaying Rachel’s voice on other glee clubbers, it is clear to the audience that the bodies we see aren’t singing. What we forget, precisely because it is so obvious to us, is that Rachel isn’t singing either; it’s a recording of her voice, and therefore, one could say, the voice of the apparatus. One can make this claim because the recording has different qualities than Rachel’s diegetic voice; the timbre is more mechanical. The cyborg, which is not tied to any one body, can pick and choose bodies to combine with its voice in blasphemous ways, such as Rachel’s “voice” in Finn’s body, queering both of them and itself adopting a performative subversion of gender.
Perhaps the most obvious type of overlay— as well as the most obvious strategy of meatsuit realness— that could be employed is only ever visibly employed once[u]: lip-synching. In “Britney 2.0,” Brittany convinces the New Directions to prerecord Britney Spears’ “Gimme More” for an assembly in a parody of a 2007 performance by Spears. As it did for Spears, the experiment in meatsuit realness ended poorly, with her lip-synching being exposed. This devaluation of lip-synching is all the more ironic because Glee is only possible through a form of lip-synching. Since [narrative] television is an inherently prerecorded medium, we can never know for sure that the sound we hear is actually sourced in the time-space we are seeing (assuming that what we are seeing is itself all one time-space, which is certainly not guaranteed). Prerecording and dubbing are ubiquitous and accepted practices in television, and Glee is no exception. On the various albums a long list of artists not on the show are credited with vocals, and it is notoriously difficult to match up who sings what when and what this means for subjectivity. If the singing voice we hear is not the voice typically emitting from that body, then not only is the ontology of that character’s voice in question, but it is an inherently cyborg space.
It is rare in this show that superimposition is associated with only one body at a time; it is much more common to have the vocal texture completely dissociate with the bodies onscreen, to emphasize orgiastic unity. In “The Power of Madonna,” Rachel, Finn, and Emma [Pilsbury (Jayma Mays)] decide to lose their virginity to Jesse [(Jonathan Groff)], Santana, and Will, respectively. These three deflowerings are presented at once in “Like a Virgin” by Madonna through a combination of superimposition and compression. Before the music even starts, there is something queer going on. We see Rachel preparing before the mirror, and hear a man’s voice (presumably Jesse’s) ask her off-screen, “are you ready?” She turns her head but doesn’t respond: it’s Finn who responds with “in a minute,” as if Jesse were asking him. Cyborgian compression—here of space—has queered this interaction, and continues to do so by continuously intercutting shots of Rachel and Jesse, Finn and Santana, and Emma and Will engaged in foreplay[40]. This intercutting is not itself very queer, but the aural texture works to queer these bodily expressions. Aside from the rare solo lines, it is very difficult to discern whose voice(s) we are hearing, in large part because of the overproduced aesthetic. However, part of this confusion is that the voices we can pick out are not always those associated with the bodies we see. From 28:09-28:14, it is clearly the same couple singing the entire line (it sounds most like Will and Emma), but there are about five cuts: each pair “singing” on camera is paired with this one voice pair. Not only is there same-sex interpenetration of these heterosexual moments via the phallic voice[41], such as when Rachel and Emma sing with the same voice (27:50-55), but the fusing of these six voices into one cyborgian voice destroys conventional subjectivity. Furthermore, it is difficult to discern who is sexualizing whom; indeed this multigendered voice is sexualizing itself. Even as the audience is presented with three models of heterosexuality, the musical and cinematographic structure undermines the heterosexuality of these moments.
It is safe to assume during “Like a Virgin” that the voices are sourced in the diegesis, albeit distorted in time-space. In other cases, however, voices don’t come from bodies onscreen, nor is a source given. This is the case in “Don’t Stop Believing,” as noted earlier. Where, then, are these voices coming from? Michel Chion identifies “a voice which has not yet been visualized, […] a kind of acting and talking shadow,” as the acousmêtre.[42] Chion stresses that there are multiple types of acousmêtre, but as he does, the following discussion will focus primarily on the complete acousmêtre, which retains this name until and unless it is visualized, and herein will be the default type. The complete acousmêtre is only possible in recorded audiovisual media; in the theater offstage voices have a definite, albeit Othered, source.[43] As such, the complete acousmêtre is always already a technologic presence, and since the voice always implies a body, it is a cyborg presence. Until and unless the acousmêtre is visually identified with a body, it remains an explicitly cyborg presence that is more noticeably mediated than voices synchretic with onscreen bodies, and thus has great power.
One could say that this power makes the acousmatic cyborg a queer monster. Jarman-Ivens provides a great synthesis of the research on the connections between ideas of queer and ideas of the monster, and the way their liminalities disrupt binaries, not unlike the cyborg[44]. Indeed, Chion’s acousmêtre is a menacing presence that is to be conquered.[45] Left unconquered, it is a forever-lingering threat. A poignant example of this occurs in “Wheels,” as Kurt prepares for the diva-off. We see and hear him prepare his piano for warm-ups and then hear him warm himself up to the magic F5 he needs to nail the diva-off, which he hits without flaw. This warm-up becomes source scoring as it is intercut with shots of Burt at the shop and an overlay of a phone ringing. The ghost-like vibrato of Kurt’s voice in this range and chromatic nature of the warm-up emphasize the unsettling and threatening meaning of the voice on the phone’s statement, which comes immediately after we hear and see Kurt triumphantly reach F5. The acousmêtre undercuts him violently with a literal threat by proclaiming to Burt “your son’s a fag” and hanging up. The acousmêtre is never given a body, and this dual threat causes Kurt to throw the competition in order to stay out of harm’s way.
Sound advance, a type of continuity editing in audiovisual media where the sound precedes its diegetic source’s visualization, is the inevitable remedy for the acousmêtre. It is a common call to and antidote for cyborg initiation; the sound coming before the visual justification creates a cyborg subject, but its meatsuit realness is enforced by the arrival of the source image by feigning synchresis. This strategy is used both extradiegetically and diegetically, and in Glee sound advance is not confined to the adjacent cut as traditionally used, but bridges far longer time periods. Though we first hear McKinley’s 1993 Glee Club perform a mash-up of KC and the Sunshine Band’s “That’s the Way” and “Shake Your Booty” diegetically in the pilot as Emma tries to convince Will to stay at McKinley, we do not see the bodily source. The only source we are given is a computer, and we don’t even see its screen. In “Saturday Night Glee-ver,” the performance is reprised, but this time we see the performance “unmediated” instead of only hearing it through a computer. It is a flashback for Will, describing the power disco held for him in his Glee Club experience. The song’s presentation here emphasizes its internalization as opposed to externalization in the pilot. Furthermore, in terms of musical style, it is much more at home in “Saturday Night Glee-ver” as a disco-themed episode than it was in the pilot, which attempted to align the show’s sound more with the rock/Broadway tradition. Finally, it relieves our long-standing (albeit very minute and unconscious) tension over not having originally seen this performance, and we have finally after three seasons conquered this acousmêtre, the longest sound advance in the show.[46]
In a diegetic use of sound advance, Rachel endeavors to overcome a cyborg acousmêtre she discovers in her pursuit of the Mother, starting in “Dream On.” We are told in the first episode that she has two gay dads, and in “Dream On” Jesse exposes her wish to reunite with her mother, a very human (as opposed to cyborg) dream. Jesse encourages this dream and plants a tape labeled “From mother to daughter” in the collection of mementos Rachel’s dads have kept for her since birth. We are as-yet unclear about Jesse’s motives for planting the tape: because we don’t immediately hear the tape, and don’t even know for sure if the voice is actually that of Rachel’s mother (the dramatic scoring seems to imply no), we can safely distance ourselves from this cyborg masquerading as a human. Later, we hear the same dramatic scoring theme again as Jesse gets in a car and says, “she has the tape. She won’t listen to it.” The camera pans to the person he’s addressing, Shelby Corcoran (Idina Menzel), the coach of Vocal Adrenaline. Jesse’s history, the conniving connotations of the theme playing, and Shelby’s presence frame this meeting as a method of deceiving Rachel through the cyborg. However, it becomes clear that it is not a simple intrigue; Jesse reveals to the audience that Shelby is Rachel’s mom. A piano theme implies that the emotions Shelby expresses during the concurrent speech are authentic, and that she is the voice on the tape. Now that the audience has a human source (albeit as-yet visually justified), we feel comfortable hearing the tape. The tape plays a recording of “Shelby” singing “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misèrables, the same musical from which Rachel drew her audition song in the pilot episode, implying a familial connection. Rachel immediately hears its authenticity, acknowledging the tape’s meatsuit realness, and this acknowledgement fosters MERM. Shots of Rachel listening to the tape give way to a shot of Shelby and Rachel synchretically performing the song together onstage, then Shelby singing in the car we left her in, then back to Rachel singing along with the tape. Rachel is halfway towards defeating the acousmêtre by involving it in a unity through MERM.
However, even if the audience knows the identity of her mother, this voice is still for Rachel an acousmêtre (and the stage performance is more than likely Shelby’s imagination and not Rachel’s), and that tension remains to be resolved. In the immediately subsequent episode, “Theatricality,” Rachel and friends break into a Vocal Adrenaline rehearsal to spy because of the groups’ battle to perform “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga. Shelby is directing a dance rehearsal and, unimpressed by the performers’ lack of theatricality, gives them a lesson in it with an “impromptu” performance of the title song from Funny Girl. Rachel begins to identify with Shelby, saying “exactly what I would have done: Barbra. I could do it in my sleep.” During the performance, Rachel recognizes Shelby’s voice as the voice on the tape. She approaches the stage and speaks over the ending scoring of the song (shifting the song to source scoring), announcing, “Ms. Corcoran, I’m Rachel Berry. I’m your daughter.” And with that, she has conquered the acousmêtre through sound advance.
Even when acousmatic voices are re-presented in their bodily contexts, their power and threat erased, however, traces of the cyborg—and thus, queerness—remain. The overproduced aesthetic that defines Glee means that in this scene, we do not hear Shelby singing; nor do we hear the 1993 Glee Club singing in the pilot. Indeed, the overproduced aesthetic and its erasure of the body means the voices we hear are not those of the bodies onscreen: they are human-computer hybrid voices. The easier it is to forget this fact, the more meatsuit realness the cyborg performer has. The cyborg has made the queer threat of subverting heterosexual unity’s essentialism, then diffused its menace by locating itself as having “really” been this person or that person all along. As a result, we forget that it is actually a technologically mediated presence and not a [human] person at all.
There are acousmêtres less threatening to the viewer and therefore much easier to conceal as cyborgs, because they fit into a tradition where their bodily source is not questioned. One is the Acousmatic Chorus, which refers to the voices that perform much of the dramatic scoring in the show. It is a very unique form of scoring, and arguably the distinctive sound of the show. It is accepted by the audience as nonthreatening for several reasons, even though the uniformity of sound and the lack of visual justification is pure cyborg. On some level, the audience expects that these disembodied voices have a source somewhere. After the first episode, the audience virtually forgets about looking for a source, because the Acousmatic Chorus has become a conventional presence in the show. It is in the first episode that our brains [might] concoct several theories about its source. The most logical source is the diegesis; since the narrative is about the formation of a glee club, it can be reasonably assumed that the voices are of the glee club members, and eventually we’ll “catch” them performing in a form of sound advance as described above. The more likely explanation, though, is that the Acousmatic Chorus functions as a cross between dramatic scoring and a sort of Greek chorus. We never do catch anyone performing as the Acousmatic Chorus: these voices are necessarily extradiegetic, as are the Greek chorus[v] and dramatic scoring. As a Greek chorus, the Acousmatic Chorus comments on the events occurring onscreen, much like dramatic scoring traditionally does. However, there seems to be something queerly cyborgian going on here. “Voices” are masquerading as dramatic scoring, an inherently technologized space either through recording or instrumental performance. This layer of drag, of course, is matched by a second, of meatsuit realness: the audience believes temporarily that these are real voices performing and not a machine. This double layering of identities and aspirations destroys the boundary between cyborg and human and provides a uniquely campy soundtrack to a show inherently tied up in navigating and questioning identity.
As dramatic scoring, and since in terms of musical form the Acousmatic Chorus has a leitmotivic function, it has the ability to signify. It takes this opportunity fairly seriously at times with copious signpost leitmotivs, but it can also get playful with its duties through Wagnerian leitmotif. In “Laryngitis,” a modified version of the theme typically associated with flashbacks is presented, which will here be called the “mohawk” theme. The mohawk theme has more vocal grain (if such a thing can be said about a cyborg; certainly someone’s grain is leaking through this new texture) in the tritone arpeggio, is more separated, develops, and is associated with Puck. The mohawk theme is first heard at the beginning of the episode as the camera walks down the hall from Puck’s point of view. Moments before, we see Puck’s mohawk, the symbol of his masculine power, get shaven off. Throughout the episode, in moments where Puck faces tribulations due to his loss of status, we hear the mohawk theme, which develops as the episode progresses. Interestingly, though his hair doesn’t grow back by the next episode, the mohawk theme is confined to “Laryngitis.” This motive is more tied up in articulating heteroic narrative and the descent into the Queer Underworld, as Puck’s masculine power is erased.
In “Mash-Up,” this articulation of Queer Underworld is accomplished by reappropriating Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee.” The episode, which comes after the introduction of recaps into the series, opens without recap with a shot of a slushie being filled and associated sounds, though we can’t see its maker. We then watch from the point of view of the person carrying the slushie as they walk down the hall to the Acousmatic Chorus’s rendition of “Flight of the Bumblebee.” He walks past New Directions members who are used to being “slushied” (a McKinley bullying tradition in which someone tosses a slushie in someone else’s face) and are shocked not to be its recipients. The music is abruptly interrupted when Finn is unexpectedly targeted, confirming his presence in the Queer Underworld. In a similar sequence later in the episode, Rachel squints to accept her fate when the camera pans to show us Puck genuinely offering her a slushie, implying that in the Slushie War he has switched sides. This is driven home about halfway through the episode when he himself is slushied, though not to the “Flight,” emphasizing his entrance into his own Queer Underworld; he no longer has access to the homophobic power of slushying or its theme. Next, we hear the “Flight” but do not see a POV slushie moving down the halls; instead we see Finn and Quinn walking in their “cool” sunglasses. We the audience now are privy to dramatic irony: when they turn the corner the hockey team awaits them with a barrage of slushies. The final such POV slushie theme sequence features Finn approaching Kurt and Rachel. However, Finn’s new unsuitability in this homophobic role is emphasized by a pan from his POV as Kurt stands up to him and the continuance of the theme until the slushie reaches Kurt’s face. Finn is unable to do it, so Kurt slushies himself for Finn. The musical theme appears once more, in the last scene, when it is revealed that Will has never been slushied. As initiation into their side of the Slushie War—and thus officially into the Queer Underworld—the New Directions slushie him. The “Flight of the Bumblebee,” then, is not only associated with the physical slushie. The slushie and its theme become a threshold into the Queer Underworld for our heteroic characters: Finn, Will, and Puck. For Puck and Will, it is an initiation, and for Finn a confirmation of his belonging to the Queer Underworld. This function is accomplished through musical reappropriation and a cyborg subject commenting on the narrative so the audience doesn’t get lost.
With one particular theme, the Acousmatic Chorus takes leitmotif even one step further and destroys its semiotic function, once again blurring boundaries. The theme that plays over the credits in every episode is used within certain episodes for various different, sometimes contradictory, reasons. It is in a major-key, in 4/4, fairly upbeat, with no chromatics and standard harmonic progressions. It makes its first appearance outside the credits in the second episode of the series, “Showmance.” Throughout the episode, its semiotics are confused; we first hear it as Quinn confronts Rachel for eavesdropping on Quinn policing Finn’s masculinity. Without the scoring, the scene can be read seriously as a confrontation between these two powers as subjects. However, the jovial, rather inane nature of the theme is at odds with the seriousness of the emotions the two project, and emphasizes that these characters are still caricatures. We as an audience have yet to break these characters out of the archetypical roles in which they have been presented. Thus, Rachel’s stilted dialogue in this scene in conjunction with the music emphasizes that we are not to take these characters seriously, especially as her dramatic exit is undercut by a slushie to the face. Later, Will begins a voiceover about how he’s going to pay for this absurdly luxurious house that his season 1 wife Terri (Jessalyn Gilsig) wants, and this theme seems to imply a convenient and comedic or to-be-satirized solution on the way. Indeed, the solution-- janitorial duty-- catalyzes his flirtation with Emma […], and thus tension between him and Terry and between Emma and Ken […], by whom Emma is currently being pursued. When later we move to a flashback to why Finn and Rachel are in the principal’s office, we hear the theme again and see them making posters for glee club using Sue’s copier. The theme seems to side with them and their naïveté in this exploit, but its previous satirical association mixed with its abrupt cut to a slow motion dropping sound also undercuts them, making this scene comedic. Finally, it greets us after a commercial break accompanied by shots of Emma setting up her lunch. This acoustic landscape is silenced by the arrival of [Ken], who is unwelcome in Emma’s neat and clean world, which actually describes the credits theme fairly well.
So what, if anything, does the credits theme signify? It is satirical and empathetic, narrative and descriptive. If anything, its purpose is not so much signification as it is a call to sympathy for the characters it portrays: in each case they are major characters to the current narrative. The destruction of phallogocentric signification—here the idea of a signpost theme meaning one and only one thing—is a very cyborg project. But the more we hear the theme, the more evident it becomes that it also signifies the connections between characters and, by extension, the blossoming of the New Directions as an ensemble. In “Wheels,” the theme is associated with the Puck-Quinn-Finn baby triangle and Quinn’s changing affections. In “Ballad,” it accompanies the sorting hat, Rachel creeping on Will, Kurt creeping on Finn, and the end of the plotline where Rachel crushes on Will. In this episode, it seems to satirize the pairing up of the members into untenable duos, and calls for reunification of the ensemble into a whole through its support of Rachel getting over Will. The appeal to reunification is a very human desire for a cyborgian presence to express, promoting the Acousmatic Chorus’s meatsuit realness. This call for reunification is reinforced by its continual association with the credits—and thus the show “itself" as one unified thing. After the mid-season pause, it is this iconicity as “the essence of the show” that seems to be drawn upon, especially when the theme is modified. In “Hell-O,” we here a slight rhythmic variation in the theme coinciding with Finn and Rachel’s and Puck and Quinn’s relationship problems, which are affecting Finn’s performance (and thus his contribution to the group). In the extended dream sequence in “Props,” a harmonically distorted version of the theme plays as Tina-as-Rachel encounters the rest of the New Directions in their traded bodies. The use of the familiar credits theme reminds us that at the moment, this is real life. The addition of augmented arpeggios and flatted notes to the theme, however, emphasizes the unnaturalness of these bodies: even the credits theme is in drag in this sequence (atonal realness!). Perhaps the most significant use of this theme in variation is in “Nationals” as the New Directions--finally after three seasons-- place their Nationals trophy in the trophy case. We hear a drum roll, referencing a rivalry theme, and then acousmatic “oo”s, piano, and bells play over a drum track, and eventually a synth reference to the credits theme clarifies who it is that has prevailed. The club doesn’t say anything; they just smile at the trophy case in silence and familial solidarity. They don’t need to say anything, because the music speaks for them: the New Directions are finally victorious. By initially refusing to signify, the Acousmatic Chorus destroyed semiotic meaning. However, the eventual introduction of signification to the credits theme—even if primarily in variation—pushes the Acousmatic Chorus across the boundary between subversion and assimilation. The performative nature of the cyborgian Acousmatic Chorus, especially with this theme, doubly queers it.
The complete acousmêtre, such as the Acousmatic Chorus, is the most obviously queerborg strategy in Glee, but there are other acousmatic presences. Voiceovers are almost all already visualized acousmêtres, and as a result, they are not as threatening, nor as obviously queer, as the complete acousmêtre. The grain of the voiceovers and narrative cues always reveal to us who is speaking. In the case of the one completely acousmatic voiceover presented in the series, Holly Holliday (Gwyneth Paltrow)’s first appearance in “The Substitute,” we don’t recognize the grain, and her initial cyborgian nature as acousmêtre is thus queerly threatening in its phallic claim to the direct discursive power of voiceover without first masquerading as human. Yet even here, the voice’s identity is made clear for us: the voiceover occurs right after Kurt says “have you met the new Spanish teacher?” so the audience is not totally lost as to who this is, nor totally left at the mercy of a queerborg, but that access is still a possibility for the show.
Furthermore, even if these are not complete acousmêtres, the lack of visual justification makes these characters in voiceover temporarily cyborgs. These cyborgs even flaunt their cyborgness at times, such as when Will acknowledges that he and Sue are speaking in voiceover in the opening sequence of “Throwdown.” Becky Jackson (Lauren Potter)’s voiceovers (spoken by Helen Mirren) are especially cyborg and juicily performati[c] in that her voiceover voice is not her diegetic voice. She acknowledges this disconnect for the audience’s benefit in her first voiceover in “Yes/No”: “You may be wondering why I sound like the Queen of England. It’s simple: in my mind, I can sound like whomever I want, so lay off haters.” Finally, Brittany’s voiceovers have a particular level of playfulness on this human/cyborg boundary and a heightened level of meatsuit realness, because they are diegetic. In the opening sequence of “Britney 2.0,” Brittany is heard in voiceover and we walk down the halls of McKinley from her point of view. Eventually, though, we see her speaking the words, stopped in the hallway, causing Blaine to ask who she’s talking to, to which she responds, “I thought I was doing a voiceover…” The voiceover acousmêtre achieves meatsuit realness in this moment, but Brittany herself becomes in a certain sense cyborg due to her knowledge that the audience can hear her. When doing her voiceover before we saw her, and during Becky’s first monologue, it could be said that they have “cyborg realness.”
There are two other characters in Glee who have cyborg realness, and infuse the cyborg into their own vocal identities, making them in certain ways queer subjects through the selective adoption of such an identity. Artie is assumed to be a cyborg due to the denaturalization of disability. Because he’s [in a wheelchair], he is described often in the first season as half a person (the other half is presumably machine); Brittany, in her first line to him, even says, “for a while I thought you were a robot.”[w] Throughout the series, Artie rejects this identity, but every once in a while he adopts it for his own purposes. He is sometimes shown doubling on guitar (as Finn does frequently on drums), which aligns him with the technical production of the performance. In “Dancing With Myself,” he begins playing guitar, but instead of cutting to a MERM scene, Artie puts down the guitar while the music is still playing, showing us the method of production and thus his cyborg powers. He has the cyborg power of vocal overlay in this song, wherein we hear more than one Artie singing simultaneously. Another interesting instance wherein Artie plays guitar is in “Vitamin D” during the boys’ mash-up of Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life” and “Confessions Part II” by Usher. The performance includes the characteristic “bow wow” of “It’s My Life,” though it is unclear how this sound is created diegetically. Yet midway through, the diegetic source is revealed: Artie uses a vocoder or talkbox (it is unclear which, but if a talkbox then it is connected to the guitar) to create this sound synchretically. Artie is also the only performer in this number with an ear mic instead of a handheld, which gives the appearance of being part of his body. Thus he is here quadruply cyborg. Because this comes before the episode in which disability is first critically addressed in the show, we do not necessarily read this as a performati[c] identity but rather an essentializing one. Looking back, however, it is clear that this is an identity strategy of Artie’s, a means of coping with his assigned status as always already cyborg. He reclaims subjectivity through accessing the queer monster lurking within the cyborg.
Sue Sylvester also has cyborg realness in certain respects, though crudely. Sue is inseparable from a red and white megaphone throughout the series; in fact, the very first line of the show is delivered by Sue through her megaphone. Indeed, the megaphone is so much a part of her identity that in “Props” during the extended dream sequence, part of what informs us that Matthew Morrison is playing Sue is his use of the megaphone. In “Funk,” Sue does not return to her regular self until Will presents her with her megaphone. Sue is also, ironically enough, the most audibly Autotuned of the characters in Glee when she sings, as noted earlier. It is strange that her vocality is so visibly cyborgian, and perhaps distances her from the original unity of the heteroic narrative. Since she is the main antagonist in the first season, it is a useful strategy to exclude her from the dominant narrative discourse, and by placing her as a queer monster through the cyborg (as well as through her more overt gender transgressions), she becomes relatively impossible to assimilate into a unity, a true cyborg. It is only through playing with cyborg realness, and the cyborg playing at meatsuit realness through her when she sings, that she can become an aurally sympathetic character in the show.
27) 18:55, emphasis mine.
28) Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991), 149.
29) Ibid.
30) Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 150.
31) Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 174.
32) Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 176, emphasis mine.
33) Jarman-Ivens, Queer Voices, 87.
34) Jarman-Ivens, Queer Voices 89.
35) Jarman-Ivens, Queer Voices 82.
36) See Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
37) Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 176.
38) À la Carolyn Abbate’s conception of Salomé; see Carolyn Abbate, “Opera: or, the Envoicing of Women,” Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, Ruth A. Solie, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
39) This is all the more ironic because in "The Boy is Mine" by Brandy and Monica, performed in the same episode, we hear way more voices than just Santana and Mercedes, but no one else in the room is shown to be singing.
40) Not only space but also character is being compressed; the three couples are interchangeable, as can be seen in their costumes. The males are all wearing black/dark clothes, the females are all wearing pink teddies/slips.
41) Jarman-Ivens, Queer Voices, 3.
42) Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia, 1999), 21.
43) Chion, The Voice in Cinema, 22.
44) Jarman-Ivens, Queer Voices, 132.
45) Chion, The Voice in Cinema, 23-4.
46) Interestingly, this footage was originally shot for the pilot, but was deemed not to fit in, probably for those selfsame reasons. For this reason it is confusing that we don't recognize the person the camera focuses on in this sequence; he is none other than Young Will. We are confused because in "Dream On," Young Will is still played by Matthew Morrison, not the guy shown in "Saturday Night Glee-ver."
q) Again I’ve defaulted to a presumptuously universal ‘we’ that in this section I ask be understood as my own experience with the material.
r) Another particularly unsettling example occurs in “The Quarterback” (5x3), the episode commemorating Finn/Monteith’s death. Santana sings The Band Perry’s “If I Die Young” and the only cues we have that she is breaking down are visual. The expected vocal flaw of an ensuing panic attack, especially in an episode almost designed for emotionality, is noticeably absent.
s) Not only has fish long been a drag tradition alongside other forms, but trans and drag discourses only separated in the past half-century or so. Passing has been a concern of both the trans community and drag circles as long as people have been ‘cross-dressing’. I have left the asterisks after ‘trans’ in this document for historical purposes.
t) Well, to the extent possible. Clearly the work of art does not exist in a vacuum.
u) In the period studied.
v) Greek choruses are often more liminal than this statement implies.
w) See proletariangothic et al. for the ableist underpinnings of a lot of cyborg discourse.
Vocal grain and flaw disrupt overproduction to create space for queer identity. However, as the songasm showed, there is also queer space within the overproduced aesthetic itself. The overproduced aesthetic leads to narrative problems not just philosophically by undermining individuality, but also by creating narrative dissonances in the way these characters are supposed to sound. There are two ways in which these dissonances become manifest, and “authenticity” is undermined: the limits of Autotune technology and missing vocal grain cues. In the first season, there are several moments where the Autotune technology is pushed to its limits and thus exposes itself to the audience. In “Throwdown” when the New Directions perform “Keep Holding On” by Avril Lavigne, the range of the arrangement is very large, which creates an unnatural sound in the high tessitura of the background part. Because such high notes are very difficult to tune, the technology is doing more work to tune these voices, making it more audible (and somewhat grating). Similarly in “Bad Reputation” when Sue sings “Physical” with Olivia Newton-John in a remake of the video, her voice is more obviously autotuned because she is not a singer, and thus the technology has to try harder to put her in tune. The audience is alerted to this by a side-effect of the technology that could be likened to a piano attempting to approximate a glissando, which surfaces when a voice is particularly out of tune or not firmly on one note.
On the other hand, when voices are well-enough Autotuned as to be unnoticeable to the audience, it can cause issues when the audience could conceivably expect vocal flaw. In “Vitamin D” Rachel says, “you’re actually a good singer, Quinn… occasionally sharp, but that’s just because you lack my years of training.”[27] Ironically, the audience can only hear this information in the dialogue, because to us[q] she doesn’t sound sharp at all; she’s perfectly in tune like everyone else. It is a common conceit in the show—again stemming from salability of the songs out of context—that some of the performances we see are “rehearsals,” for example the first number performed by the New Directions, “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat” from Guys ‘N Dolls. The narrative is structured around this performance being a flop, but musically it is as flawless as any other. It is only the sloppy choreography and the faces made by the performers and Will that indicate something is wrong; we can’t hear the difference[r]. In fact, in later episodes, it gets so hard to identify which songs are just in rehearsal and which are actual performances that “rehearsals” are marked by prominently displayed sheet music when the rehearsal aspect is narratively important. In the “Mattress” performance of “Smile” by Lily Allen, for example, Finn’s reliance on the sheet music helps distance him from Rachel and the romantic implications of the performance. This both preserves his relationship with Quinn and maintains his heteroic integrity. Such distancing cannot be accomplished musically and still leave this song readily exportable.
As can probably be guessed from these examples, Glee combats these authenticity conflicts through non-aural cues both visually and in the dialogue. The show creates a discourse around the impossibility of vocal flaw in Rachel (conveniently forgetting the exception of “Laryngitis”), making space for Rachel to fail without compromising the acoustic world of Glee. In “Duets,” we receive a polished rehearsal by Finn and Rachel for the duet assignment, after which they agree, rather unenthusiastically, that they have the competition in the bag. They decide to throw the competition to allow new talent to emerge, and Rachel tellingly says “we have to find a way for me to lose a singing competition.” They don’t accomplish this through attempting to introduce vocal flaw into her routine, because they’ve already made the joke that such a tactic is not an option; instead, they pick a song so offensive that no one would dare let them win. Similarly, in “Choke,” Rachel’s failure in her NYADA audition is not through vocal flaw, but through messing up the lyrics; the acoustic world is never compromised. This strategy is most evident in “Blame It on the Alcohol,” where the [sic] Rachel’s lack of vocal flaw is graciously extended to the other drunk characters in the episode. Blaine and Rachel, then Will and Shannon Beiste (Dot-Marie Jones) give drunk karaoke duets, but neither pair exhibits the vocal grain associated with intoxicated people. The scenes rely on visual markers of drunkenness and the singing of a drunken crowd to give the impression of intoxication instead of its auditory manifestation. Again, the acoustic world is left intact.
On the surface, there is nothing inherently queer in this strategy: there is no narrative subversion, nor a resistance to technology. However, the performative masking and unmasking of vocal flaw and vocal grain itself can be understood as creating a queer space. What’s odd about this is that no subject seems to be doing the performing; the show itself is taking up sonic identities at will. But what is the nature of the show’s “subjectivity?” Because Glee engages in several discourses of queerness and layers of performative signification, the show seems to be functioning as a fruitful example of that most queer of beings, the cyborg, in its embrace of multiplicities and contradictions.
Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” theorizes ways that cyborgs could be seen as a space for queering subjectivity. The cyborg is rooted in the tradition of blasphemy, which emphasizes community but not group policing, and is inherently ironic[28]. It is “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.”[29] In terms of gender and sex(uality), the cyborg is an anti-heterosexist and anti-gender binary being, because cyborgs do not require heterosexual coupling or sex for reproduction[30]. The cyborg has no use for the myth of original unity and heterosexual reunification; it is a disjunction. The cyborg’s inherent fluidity, liminality, and transience make it for Haraway the ideal queer subject.
The cyborg, then, is always already queer in its existence outside of a sexualized space and therefore transgressive of sex/gender boundaries when also crossing boundaries of human/machine. But it also crosses boundaries of subjectivity and stable identity. Stable identity and subjectivity are destroyed by cyborg authorship because in enacting several liminalities at once, the binary system falls apart.[31] In other words, “cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism.”[32]
Jarman-Ivens has taken this queer cyborg subjectivity a step further, articulating a queerborg (queer cyborg) vocality. In her analysis of The Carpenters, she notes how in attempting to tame the vocal grain the body is erased and replaced by technologized voices, making such technologically-mediated performances examples of the cyborg. “If,” she argues, “external technologies are always present in the making and distribution of music, but are variably visible […], the ‘visibility’ of the external technology involved necessarily has an impact on the perception of any human/machine fusion.”[33] She takes Haraway’s point about the cyborg’s lack of origin story and relates it to her psychoanalytic framework of the pheno-song and geno-song, articulating another queer layer in the cyborg in that by fracturing identity and subjectivity it creates the illusion of reunification.[34] In Glee, that reunification is the overproduced aesthetic.
The deployment of cyborg subjectivity, then, is a form of drag, and like all drag, is predicated on illusion and play: “the illusion is never really an illusion, but a suggestion of one, just as the drag queen never really passes as a woman but instead gestures toward the imitation.”[35] The previous quote requires some unpacking, because passing is an important project for the cyborg. As was argued earlier concerning the Myth of Spontaneity, realness is also a drag project. But for Jarman-Ivens’ conception of drag, realness is an incoherent term, because drag is only possible as a satire of or imitation of gender instead of an aspiration toward not being read as an imitation. However, in some ways realness is the aesthetic of drag; it is the pursuit of realness that makes the drag project legible. In this sense, Jarman-Ivens is noting that realness is the gesture towards imitation instead of an actual ability to pass. However, with the rise in prominence of trans* identities, passing has a certain currency in drag circles, and “fish”—a male’s ability to be read as female in such a way as to hide the technologies erasing the male body—has become an accepted drag tradition[s]. In that sense, Jarman-Ivens’ prohibition of fish through her assertion that the drag queen never really passes as a woman seems unnecessarily exclusive and limiting to drag’s theatrical possibilities.
As mentioned, fish is a vital project for the cyborg’s drag aesthetic, because the context for its drag is different than that of human drag royalty. The drag performance or drag ball is a constrained space contextualized as explicit theater, allowing the audience to leave this space with the comfort of knowing it was all in jest and that the questions these “performers” ask about gender and sexuality are no threat to their everyday lives.[36] The cyborg, to be allowed to exist by the dominant culture, also needs to reinscribe human gender and sexuality norms, but cannot utilize the traditional drag strategy of announcing its gender play because its intersectionality as queer and inhuman marginalizes it from this discourse. It therefore relies on fish to accomplish its drag project. It appropriates and plays with the gender and sexuality cues used by humans but hides the technologic production of these methods as a fish aesthetic. The success of this project relies on the ability of a cyborg to pass as human, or to give the illusion that there is an unmediated body (“meatsuit”) performing: “meatsuit realness.”
Meatsuit realness might appear to be the opposite of how Haraway imagines cyborgs should function. Haraway’s cyborgs “insist on noise and advocate pollution,” and yet meatsuit realness idealizes seamlessness and clean integration— unity, if you will— between human and cyborg.[37] But there are two potential assuaging responses to this dilemma. First, Haraway’s cyborg relishes contradiction and blasphemy, so presumably this blasphemy also extends to her myth of the cyborg. Second, drag itself is a form of gender: it adopts these codes that have phallogocentric origins yet makes no claim to them as a first language, in true cyborg fashion. The more damning criticism is that fish, and therefore meatsuit realness, seems to search for an original unity with the performed gender/chemical composition, a project of no interest to the cyborg.
This is all the more pressing when we consider that in Glee and the post-Believe pop industry, the creators of these products don’t necessarily want their consumers to see the cyborg. One must, however, divorce the creator from the creation, as with any piece of art[t]. The cyborg creation unmasks itself at will, regardless of the intentions of the creator, because there is no original unity between the two (assuming there even is a creator; Haraway is unclear as to what the origins of the cyborg exactly are if not an original unity). The cyborg product does not emerge from any carbon-based womb-like place; it is never physically part of the creator, and therefore has no context or reverence for the creator’s intentions. Whether or not the creator intended to reveal or disclose the cyborg, perhaps by clinging to the Myth of Spontaneity, is irrelevant; the queerborg possibility of meatsuit realness is in its very existence as a technologically-mediated thing and the continual threat of its unveiling[38]. Luckily, the methods of its exposure are many.
In Glee, perhaps the more playful of these methods is overlay, of which there are two types: temporal compression and superimposition. Film and television, as recorded media, are not bound by physical temporality as directly as, say, theater. This makes it possible for what would be consecutive live performances to take place onscreen simultaneously, compressing the time span into that of one number. The “Defying Gravity” diva-off is a great example of this type of overlay, as Kurt’s and Rachel’s voices weave among each other and create a duet where there were actually two solos. We know Kurt and Rachel aren’t singing simultaneously in the diegesis due to the lack of harmonic interplay between them that is typical of duets, and the cinematography clues us in by intercutting shots of Kurt singing then shots of Rachel singing. In fact, there is a shot at the first “and you won’t bring me down” where Kurt, singing, looks over at Rachel, who is watching his performance. And yet, this very intercutting between synchretic lines by Kurt then Rachel collapses these two performances of the same song into one whole presentation made of bits and pieces from each individual performance. The queer implications of this performance have already been discussed, but there is an added sense of unity between the two because Kurt and Rachel combine to form one multigendered solo voice.
Because the overproduced aesthetic erases the body, the voices can also be superimposed on other bodies, or several bodies at once, for certain narrative effects. There is a scene in “Laryngitis” where Rachel and Lauren Zizes (Ashley Fink)—who at this point has not joined the New Directions and is head of the AV club—bug the choir room because everyone is moving their mouths in rehearsal but half of them aren’t actually singing.[39] According to Rachel’s logic, there is no way to prove that no one else is singing except through appeal to technology. Zizes records a warm-up for Rachel, who plays it back with the voices divorced from their bodies on a complicated-looking technological apparatus. The apparatus tells her what she already knew: that some of the humans are not vocal sources; indeed this cyborg is the only reliable vocal source in this situation, except perhaps Rachel. We may safely call this apparatus a cyborg and not a robot because it seems to be in control of the shot sequence in which we see Rachel discover this information, exercising agency in its choice of bodies. The warm-up is recorded and we see the three-way alliance between Rachel, the apparatus, and Zizes. Rachel stops the tape, rewinds, and we get a shot of Rachel and only her singing, with timbral qualities implying this is not as played back through the machine. Cut to Rachel listening to the apparatus play back her voice, then a shot of Finn singing to the same playback recording of Rachel’s voice. Cut to Rachel scribbling names, pausing the tape, then Santana, Brittany, and Quinn singing with the voice of Rachel through playback, intercut with shots of Rachel listening and scribbling. By overlaying Rachel’s voice on other glee clubbers, it is clear to the audience that the bodies we see aren’t singing. What we forget, precisely because it is so obvious to us, is that Rachel isn’t singing either; it’s a recording of her voice, and therefore, one could say, the voice of the apparatus. One can make this claim because the recording has different qualities than Rachel’s diegetic voice; the timbre is more mechanical. The cyborg, which is not tied to any one body, can pick and choose bodies to combine with its voice in blasphemous ways, such as Rachel’s “voice” in Finn’s body, queering both of them and itself adopting a performative subversion of gender.
Perhaps the most obvious type of overlay— as well as the most obvious strategy of meatsuit realness— that could be employed is only ever visibly employed once[u]: lip-synching. In “Britney 2.0,” Brittany convinces the New Directions to prerecord Britney Spears’ “Gimme More” for an assembly in a parody of a 2007 performance by Spears. As it did for Spears, the experiment in meatsuit realness ended poorly, with her lip-synching being exposed. This devaluation of lip-synching is all the more ironic because Glee is only possible through a form of lip-synching. Since [narrative] television is an inherently prerecorded medium, we can never know for sure that the sound we hear is actually sourced in the time-space we are seeing (assuming that what we are seeing is itself all one time-space, which is certainly not guaranteed). Prerecording and dubbing are ubiquitous and accepted practices in television, and Glee is no exception. On the various albums a long list of artists not on the show are credited with vocals, and it is notoriously difficult to match up who sings what when and what this means for subjectivity. If the singing voice we hear is not the voice typically emitting from that body, then not only is the ontology of that character’s voice in question, but it is an inherently cyborg space.
It is rare in this show that superimposition is associated with only one body at a time; it is much more common to have the vocal texture completely dissociate with the bodies onscreen, to emphasize orgiastic unity. In “The Power of Madonna,” Rachel, Finn, and Emma [Pilsbury (Jayma Mays)] decide to lose their virginity to Jesse [(Jonathan Groff)], Santana, and Will, respectively. These three deflowerings are presented at once in “Like a Virgin” by Madonna through a combination of superimposition and compression. Before the music even starts, there is something queer going on. We see Rachel preparing before the mirror, and hear a man’s voice (presumably Jesse’s) ask her off-screen, “are you ready?” She turns her head but doesn’t respond: it’s Finn who responds with “in a minute,” as if Jesse were asking him. Cyborgian compression—here of space—has queered this interaction, and continues to do so by continuously intercutting shots of Rachel and Jesse, Finn and Santana, and Emma and Will engaged in foreplay[40]. This intercutting is not itself very queer, but the aural texture works to queer these bodily expressions. Aside from the rare solo lines, it is very difficult to discern whose voice(s) we are hearing, in large part because of the overproduced aesthetic. However, part of this confusion is that the voices we can pick out are not always those associated with the bodies we see. From 28:09-28:14, it is clearly the same couple singing the entire line (it sounds most like Will and Emma), but there are about five cuts: each pair “singing” on camera is paired with this one voice pair. Not only is there same-sex interpenetration of these heterosexual moments via the phallic voice[41], such as when Rachel and Emma sing with the same voice (27:50-55), but the fusing of these six voices into one cyborgian voice destroys conventional subjectivity. Furthermore, it is difficult to discern who is sexualizing whom; indeed this multigendered voice is sexualizing itself. Even as the audience is presented with three models of heterosexuality, the musical and cinematographic structure undermines the heterosexuality of these moments.
It is safe to assume during “Like a Virgin” that the voices are sourced in the diegesis, albeit distorted in time-space. In other cases, however, voices don’t come from bodies onscreen, nor is a source given. This is the case in “Don’t Stop Believing,” as noted earlier. Where, then, are these voices coming from? Michel Chion identifies “a voice which has not yet been visualized, […] a kind of acting and talking shadow,” as the acousmêtre.[42] Chion stresses that there are multiple types of acousmêtre, but as he does, the following discussion will focus primarily on the complete acousmêtre, which retains this name until and unless it is visualized, and herein will be the default type. The complete acousmêtre is only possible in recorded audiovisual media; in the theater offstage voices have a definite, albeit Othered, source.[43] As such, the complete acousmêtre is always already a technologic presence, and since the voice always implies a body, it is a cyborg presence. Until and unless the acousmêtre is visually identified with a body, it remains an explicitly cyborg presence that is more noticeably mediated than voices synchretic with onscreen bodies, and thus has great power.
One could say that this power makes the acousmatic cyborg a queer monster. Jarman-Ivens provides a great synthesis of the research on the connections between ideas of queer and ideas of the monster, and the way their liminalities disrupt binaries, not unlike the cyborg[44]. Indeed, Chion’s acousmêtre is a menacing presence that is to be conquered.[45] Left unconquered, it is a forever-lingering threat. A poignant example of this occurs in “Wheels,” as Kurt prepares for the diva-off. We see and hear him prepare his piano for warm-ups and then hear him warm himself up to the magic F5 he needs to nail the diva-off, which he hits without flaw. This warm-up becomes source scoring as it is intercut with shots of Burt at the shop and an overlay of a phone ringing. The ghost-like vibrato of Kurt’s voice in this range and chromatic nature of the warm-up emphasize the unsettling and threatening meaning of the voice on the phone’s statement, which comes immediately after we hear and see Kurt triumphantly reach F5. The acousmêtre undercuts him violently with a literal threat by proclaiming to Burt “your son’s a fag” and hanging up. The acousmêtre is never given a body, and this dual threat causes Kurt to throw the competition in order to stay out of harm’s way.
Sound advance, a type of continuity editing in audiovisual media where the sound precedes its diegetic source’s visualization, is the inevitable remedy for the acousmêtre. It is a common call to and antidote for cyborg initiation; the sound coming before the visual justification creates a cyborg subject, but its meatsuit realness is enforced by the arrival of the source image by feigning synchresis. This strategy is used both extradiegetically and diegetically, and in Glee sound advance is not confined to the adjacent cut as traditionally used, but bridges far longer time periods. Though we first hear McKinley’s 1993 Glee Club perform a mash-up of KC and the Sunshine Band’s “That’s the Way” and “Shake Your Booty” diegetically in the pilot as Emma tries to convince Will to stay at McKinley, we do not see the bodily source. The only source we are given is a computer, and we don’t even see its screen. In “Saturday Night Glee-ver,” the performance is reprised, but this time we see the performance “unmediated” instead of only hearing it through a computer. It is a flashback for Will, describing the power disco held for him in his Glee Club experience. The song’s presentation here emphasizes its internalization as opposed to externalization in the pilot. Furthermore, in terms of musical style, it is much more at home in “Saturday Night Glee-ver” as a disco-themed episode than it was in the pilot, which attempted to align the show’s sound more with the rock/Broadway tradition. Finally, it relieves our long-standing (albeit very minute and unconscious) tension over not having originally seen this performance, and we have finally after three seasons conquered this acousmêtre, the longest sound advance in the show.[46]
In a diegetic use of sound advance, Rachel endeavors to overcome a cyborg acousmêtre she discovers in her pursuit of the Mother, starting in “Dream On.” We are told in the first episode that she has two gay dads, and in “Dream On” Jesse exposes her wish to reunite with her mother, a very human (as opposed to cyborg) dream. Jesse encourages this dream and plants a tape labeled “From mother to daughter” in the collection of mementos Rachel’s dads have kept for her since birth. We are as-yet unclear about Jesse’s motives for planting the tape: because we don’t immediately hear the tape, and don’t even know for sure if the voice is actually that of Rachel’s mother (the dramatic scoring seems to imply no), we can safely distance ourselves from this cyborg masquerading as a human. Later, we hear the same dramatic scoring theme again as Jesse gets in a car and says, “she has the tape. She won’t listen to it.” The camera pans to the person he’s addressing, Shelby Corcoran (Idina Menzel), the coach of Vocal Adrenaline. Jesse’s history, the conniving connotations of the theme playing, and Shelby’s presence frame this meeting as a method of deceiving Rachel through the cyborg. However, it becomes clear that it is not a simple intrigue; Jesse reveals to the audience that Shelby is Rachel’s mom. A piano theme implies that the emotions Shelby expresses during the concurrent speech are authentic, and that she is the voice on the tape. Now that the audience has a human source (albeit as-yet visually justified), we feel comfortable hearing the tape. The tape plays a recording of “Shelby” singing “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misèrables, the same musical from which Rachel drew her audition song in the pilot episode, implying a familial connection. Rachel immediately hears its authenticity, acknowledging the tape’s meatsuit realness, and this acknowledgement fosters MERM. Shots of Rachel listening to the tape give way to a shot of Shelby and Rachel synchretically performing the song together onstage, then Shelby singing in the car we left her in, then back to Rachel singing along with the tape. Rachel is halfway towards defeating the acousmêtre by involving it in a unity through MERM.
However, even if the audience knows the identity of her mother, this voice is still for Rachel an acousmêtre (and the stage performance is more than likely Shelby’s imagination and not Rachel’s), and that tension remains to be resolved. In the immediately subsequent episode, “Theatricality,” Rachel and friends break into a Vocal Adrenaline rehearsal to spy because of the groups’ battle to perform “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga. Shelby is directing a dance rehearsal and, unimpressed by the performers’ lack of theatricality, gives them a lesson in it with an “impromptu” performance of the title song from Funny Girl. Rachel begins to identify with Shelby, saying “exactly what I would have done: Barbra. I could do it in my sleep.” During the performance, Rachel recognizes Shelby’s voice as the voice on the tape. She approaches the stage and speaks over the ending scoring of the song (shifting the song to source scoring), announcing, “Ms. Corcoran, I’m Rachel Berry. I’m your daughter.” And with that, she has conquered the acousmêtre through sound advance.
Even when acousmatic voices are re-presented in their bodily contexts, their power and threat erased, however, traces of the cyborg—and thus, queerness—remain. The overproduced aesthetic that defines Glee means that in this scene, we do not hear Shelby singing; nor do we hear the 1993 Glee Club singing in the pilot. Indeed, the overproduced aesthetic and its erasure of the body means the voices we hear are not those of the bodies onscreen: they are human-computer hybrid voices. The easier it is to forget this fact, the more meatsuit realness the cyborg performer has. The cyborg has made the queer threat of subverting heterosexual unity’s essentialism, then diffused its menace by locating itself as having “really” been this person or that person all along. As a result, we forget that it is actually a technologically mediated presence and not a [human] person at all.
There are acousmêtres less threatening to the viewer and therefore much easier to conceal as cyborgs, because they fit into a tradition where their bodily source is not questioned. One is the Acousmatic Chorus, which refers to the voices that perform much of the dramatic scoring in the show. It is a very unique form of scoring, and arguably the distinctive sound of the show. It is accepted by the audience as nonthreatening for several reasons, even though the uniformity of sound and the lack of visual justification is pure cyborg. On some level, the audience expects that these disembodied voices have a source somewhere. After the first episode, the audience virtually forgets about looking for a source, because the Acousmatic Chorus has become a conventional presence in the show. It is in the first episode that our brains [might] concoct several theories about its source. The most logical source is the diegesis; since the narrative is about the formation of a glee club, it can be reasonably assumed that the voices are of the glee club members, and eventually we’ll “catch” them performing in a form of sound advance as described above. The more likely explanation, though, is that the Acousmatic Chorus functions as a cross between dramatic scoring and a sort of Greek chorus. We never do catch anyone performing as the Acousmatic Chorus: these voices are necessarily extradiegetic, as are the Greek chorus[v] and dramatic scoring. As a Greek chorus, the Acousmatic Chorus comments on the events occurring onscreen, much like dramatic scoring traditionally does. However, there seems to be something queerly cyborgian going on here. “Voices” are masquerading as dramatic scoring, an inherently technologized space either through recording or instrumental performance. This layer of drag, of course, is matched by a second, of meatsuit realness: the audience believes temporarily that these are real voices performing and not a machine. This double layering of identities and aspirations destroys the boundary between cyborg and human and provides a uniquely campy soundtrack to a show inherently tied up in navigating and questioning identity.
As dramatic scoring, and since in terms of musical form the Acousmatic Chorus has a leitmotivic function, it has the ability to signify. It takes this opportunity fairly seriously at times with copious signpost leitmotivs, but it can also get playful with its duties through Wagnerian leitmotif. In “Laryngitis,” a modified version of the theme typically associated with flashbacks is presented, which will here be called the “mohawk” theme. The mohawk theme has more vocal grain (if such a thing can be said about a cyborg; certainly someone’s grain is leaking through this new texture) in the tritone arpeggio, is more separated, develops, and is associated with Puck. The mohawk theme is first heard at the beginning of the episode as the camera walks down the hall from Puck’s point of view. Moments before, we see Puck’s mohawk, the symbol of his masculine power, get shaven off. Throughout the episode, in moments where Puck faces tribulations due to his loss of status, we hear the mohawk theme, which develops as the episode progresses. Interestingly, though his hair doesn’t grow back by the next episode, the mohawk theme is confined to “Laryngitis.” This motive is more tied up in articulating heteroic narrative and the descent into the Queer Underworld, as Puck’s masculine power is erased.
In “Mash-Up,” this articulation of Queer Underworld is accomplished by reappropriating Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee.” The episode, which comes after the introduction of recaps into the series, opens without recap with a shot of a slushie being filled and associated sounds, though we can’t see its maker. We then watch from the point of view of the person carrying the slushie as they walk down the hall to the Acousmatic Chorus’s rendition of “Flight of the Bumblebee.” He walks past New Directions members who are used to being “slushied” (a McKinley bullying tradition in which someone tosses a slushie in someone else’s face) and are shocked not to be its recipients. The music is abruptly interrupted when Finn is unexpectedly targeted, confirming his presence in the Queer Underworld. In a similar sequence later in the episode, Rachel squints to accept her fate when the camera pans to show us Puck genuinely offering her a slushie, implying that in the Slushie War he has switched sides. This is driven home about halfway through the episode when he himself is slushied, though not to the “Flight,” emphasizing his entrance into his own Queer Underworld; he no longer has access to the homophobic power of slushying or its theme. Next, we hear the “Flight” but do not see a POV slushie moving down the halls; instead we see Finn and Quinn walking in their “cool” sunglasses. We the audience now are privy to dramatic irony: when they turn the corner the hockey team awaits them with a barrage of slushies. The final such POV slushie theme sequence features Finn approaching Kurt and Rachel. However, Finn’s new unsuitability in this homophobic role is emphasized by a pan from his POV as Kurt stands up to him and the continuance of the theme until the slushie reaches Kurt’s face. Finn is unable to do it, so Kurt slushies himself for Finn. The musical theme appears once more, in the last scene, when it is revealed that Will has never been slushied. As initiation into their side of the Slushie War—and thus officially into the Queer Underworld—the New Directions slushie him. The “Flight of the Bumblebee,” then, is not only associated with the physical slushie. The slushie and its theme become a threshold into the Queer Underworld for our heteroic characters: Finn, Will, and Puck. For Puck and Will, it is an initiation, and for Finn a confirmation of his belonging to the Queer Underworld. This function is accomplished through musical reappropriation and a cyborg subject commenting on the narrative so the audience doesn’t get lost.
With one particular theme, the Acousmatic Chorus takes leitmotif even one step further and destroys its semiotic function, once again blurring boundaries. The theme that plays over the credits in every episode is used within certain episodes for various different, sometimes contradictory, reasons. It is in a major-key, in 4/4, fairly upbeat, with no chromatics and standard harmonic progressions. It makes its first appearance outside the credits in the second episode of the series, “Showmance.” Throughout the episode, its semiotics are confused; we first hear it as Quinn confronts Rachel for eavesdropping on Quinn policing Finn’s masculinity. Without the scoring, the scene can be read seriously as a confrontation between these two powers as subjects. However, the jovial, rather inane nature of the theme is at odds with the seriousness of the emotions the two project, and emphasizes that these characters are still caricatures. We as an audience have yet to break these characters out of the archetypical roles in which they have been presented. Thus, Rachel’s stilted dialogue in this scene in conjunction with the music emphasizes that we are not to take these characters seriously, especially as her dramatic exit is undercut by a slushie to the face. Later, Will begins a voiceover about how he’s going to pay for this absurdly luxurious house that his season 1 wife Terri (Jessalyn Gilsig) wants, and this theme seems to imply a convenient and comedic or to-be-satirized solution on the way. Indeed, the solution-- janitorial duty-- catalyzes his flirtation with Emma […], and thus tension between him and Terry and between Emma and Ken […], by whom Emma is currently being pursued. When later we move to a flashback to why Finn and Rachel are in the principal’s office, we hear the theme again and see them making posters for glee club using Sue’s copier. The theme seems to side with them and their naïveté in this exploit, but its previous satirical association mixed with its abrupt cut to a slow motion dropping sound also undercuts them, making this scene comedic. Finally, it greets us after a commercial break accompanied by shots of Emma setting up her lunch. This acoustic landscape is silenced by the arrival of [Ken], who is unwelcome in Emma’s neat and clean world, which actually describes the credits theme fairly well.
So what, if anything, does the credits theme signify? It is satirical and empathetic, narrative and descriptive. If anything, its purpose is not so much signification as it is a call to sympathy for the characters it portrays: in each case they are major characters to the current narrative. The destruction of phallogocentric signification—here the idea of a signpost theme meaning one and only one thing—is a very cyborg project. But the more we hear the theme, the more evident it becomes that it also signifies the connections between characters and, by extension, the blossoming of the New Directions as an ensemble. In “Wheels,” the theme is associated with the Puck-Quinn-Finn baby triangle and Quinn’s changing affections. In “Ballad,” it accompanies the sorting hat, Rachel creeping on Will, Kurt creeping on Finn, and the end of the plotline where Rachel crushes on Will. In this episode, it seems to satirize the pairing up of the members into untenable duos, and calls for reunification of the ensemble into a whole through its support of Rachel getting over Will. The appeal to reunification is a very human desire for a cyborgian presence to express, promoting the Acousmatic Chorus’s meatsuit realness. This call for reunification is reinforced by its continual association with the credits—and thus the show “itself" as one unified thing. After the mid-season pause, it is this iconicity as “the essence of the show” that seems to be drawn upon, especially when the theme is modified. In “Hell-O,” we here a slight rhythmic variation in the theme coinciding with Finn and Rachel’s and Puck and Quinn’s relationship problems, which are affecting Finn’s performance (and thus his contribution to the group). In the extended dream sequence in “Props,” a harmonically distorted version of the theme plays as Tina-as-Rachel encounters the rest of the New Directions in their traded bodies. The use of the familiar credits theme reminds us that at the moment, this is real life. The addition of augmented arpeggios and flatted notes to the theme, however, emphasizes the unnaturalness of these bodies: even the credits theme is in drag in this sequence (atonal realness!). Perhaps the most significant use of this theme in variation is in “Nationals” as the New Directions--finally after three seasons-- place their Nationals trophy in the trophy case. We hear a drum roll, referencing a rivalry theme, and then acousmatic “oo”s, piano, and bells play over a drum track, and eventually a synth reference to the credits theme clarifies who it is that has prevailed. The club doesn’t say anything; they just smile at the trophy case in silence and familial solidarity. They don’t need to say anything, because the music speaks for them: the New Directions are finally victorious. By initially refusing to signify, the Acousmatic Chorus destroyed semiotic meaning. However, the eventual introduction of signification to the credits theme—even if primarily in variation—pushes the Acousmatic Chorus across the boundary between subversion and assimilation. The performative nature of the cyborgian Acousmatic Chorus, especially with this theme, doubly queers it.
The complete acousmêtre, such as the Acousmatic Chorus, is the most obviously queerborg strategy in Glee, but there are other acousmatic presences. Voiceovers are almost all already visualized acousmêtres, and as a result, they are not as threatening, nor as obviously queer, as the complete acousmêtre. The grain of the voiceovers and narrative cues always reveal to us who is speaking. In the case of the one completely acousmatic voiceover presented in the series, Holly Holliday (Gwyneth Paltrow)’s first appearance in “The Substitute,” we don’t recognize the grain, and her initial cyborgian nature as acousmêtre is thus queerly threatening in its phallic claim to the direct discursive power of voiceover without first masquerading as human. Yet even here, the voice’s identity is made clear for us: the voiceover occurs right after Kurt says “have you met the new Spanish teacher?” so the audience is not totally lost as to who this is, nor totally left at the mercy of a queerborg, but that access is still a possibility for the show.
Furthermore, even if these are not complete acousmêtres, the lack of visual justification makes these characters in voiceover temporarily cyborgs. These cyborgs even flaunt their cyborgness at times, such as when Will acknowledges that he and Sue are speaking in voiceover in the opening sequence of “Throwdown.” Becky Jackson (Lauren Potter)’s voiceovers (spoken by Helen Mirren) are especially cyborg and juicily performati[c] in that her voiceover voice is not her diegetic voice. She acknowledges this disconnect for the audience’s benefit in her first voiceover in “Yes/No”: “You may be wondering why I sound like the Queen of England. It’s simple: in my mind, I can sound like whomever I want, so lay off haters.” Finally, Brittany’s voiceovers have a particular level of playfulness on this human/cyborg boundary and a heightened level of meatsuit realness, because they are diegetic. In the opening sequence of “Britney 2.0,” Brittany is heard in voiceover and we walk down the halls of McKinley from her point of view. Eventually, though, we see her speaking the words, stopped in the hallway, causing Blaine to ask who she’s talking to, to which she responds, “I thought I was doing a voiceover…” The voiceover acousmêtre achieves meatsuit realness in this moment, but Brittany herself becomes in a certain sense cyborg due to her knowledge that the audience can hear her. When doing her voiceover before we saw her, and during Becky’s first monologue, it could be said that they have “cyborg realness.”
There are two other characters in Glee who have cyborg realness, and infuse the cyborg into their own vocal identities, making them in certain ways queer subjects through the selective adoption of such an identity. Artie is assumed to be a cyborg due to the denaturalization of disability. Because he’s [in a wheelchair], he is described often in the first season as half a person (the other half is presumably machine); Brittany, in her first line to him, even says, “for a while I thought you were a robot.”[w] Throughout the series, Artie rejects this identity, but every once in a while he adopts it for his own purposes. He is sometimes shown doubling on guitar (as Finn does frequently on drums), which aligns him with the technical production of the performance. In “Dancing With Myself,” he begins playing guitar, but instead of cutting to a MERM scene, Artie puts down the guitar while the music is still playing, showing us the method of production and thus his cyborg powers. He has the cyborg power of vocal overlay in this song, wherein we hear more than one Artie singing simultaneously. Another interesting instance wherein Artie plays guitar is in “Vitamin D” during the boys’ mash-up of Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life” and “Confessions Part II” by Usher. The performance includes the characteristic “bow wow” of “It’s My Life,” though it is unclear how this sound is created diegetically. Yet midway through, the diegetic source is revealed: Artie uses a vocoder or talkbox (it is unclear which, but if a talkbox then it is connected to the guitar) to create this sound synchretically. Artie is also the only performer in this number with an ear mic instead of a handheld, which gives the appearance of being part of his body. Thus he is here quadruply cyborg. Because this comes before the episode in which disability is first critically addressed in the show, we do not necessarily read this as a performati[c] identity but rather an essentializing one. Looking back, however, it is clear that this is an identity strategy of Artie’s, a means of coping with his assigned status as always already cyborg. He reclaims subjectivity through accessing the queer monster lurking within the cyborg.
Sue Sylvester also has cyborg realness in certain respects, though crudely. Sue is inseparable from a red and white megaphone throughout the series; in fact, the very first line of the show is delivered by Sue through her megaphone. Indeed, the megaphone is so much a part of her identity that in “Props” during the extended dream sequence, part of what informs us that Matthew Morrison is playing Sue is his use of the megaphone. In “Funk,” Sue does not return to her regular self until Will presents her with her megaphone. Sue is also, ironically enough, the most audibly Autotuned of the characters in Glee when she sings, as noted earlier. It is strange that her vocality is so visibly cyborgian, and perhaps distances her from the original unity of the heteroic narrative. Since she is the main antagonist in the first season, it is a useful strategy to exclude her from the dominant narrative discourse, and by placing her as a queer monster through the cyborg (as well as through her more overt gender transgressions), she becomes relatively impossible to assimilate into a unity, a true cyborg. It is only through playing with cyborg realness, and the cyborg playing at meatsuit realness through her when she sings, that she can become an aurally sympathetic character in the show.
Notes
27) 18:55, emphasis mine.
28) Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991), 149.
29) Ibid.
30) Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 150.
31) Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 174.
32) Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 176, emphasis mine.
33) Jarman-Ivens, Queer Voices, 87.
34) Jarman-Ivens, Queer Voices 89.
35) Jarman-Ivens, Queer Voices 82.
36) See Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
37) Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 176.
38) À la Carolyn Abbate’s conception of Salomé; see Carolyn Abbate, “Opera: or, the Envoicing of Women,” Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, Ruth A. Solie, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
39) This is all the more ironic because in "The Boy is Mine" by Brandy and Monica, performed in the same episode, we hear way more voices than just Santana and Mercedes, but no one else in the room is shown to be singing.
40) Not only space but also character is being compressed; the three couples are interchangeable, as can be seen in their costumes. The males are all wearing black/dark clothes, the females are all wearing pink teddies/slips.
41) Jarman-Ivens, Queer Voices, 3.
42) Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia, 1999), 21.
43) Chion, The Voice in Cinema, 22.
44) Jarman-Ivens, Queer Voices, 132.
45) Chion, The Voice in Cinema, 23-4.
46) Interestingly, this footage was originally shot for the pilot, but was deemed not to fit in, probably for those selfsame reasons. For this reason it is confusing that we don't recognize the person the camera focuses on in this sequence; he is none other than Young Will. We are confused because in "Dream On," Young Will is still played by Matthew Morrison, not the guy shown in "Saturday Night Glee-ver."
q) Again I’ve defaulted to a presumptuously universal ‘we’ that in this section I ask be understood as my own experience with the material.
r) Another particularly unsettling example occurs in “The Quarterback” (5x3), the episode commemorating Finn/Monteith’s death. Santana sings The Band Perry’s “If I Die Young” and the only cues we have that she is breaking down are visual. The expected vocal flaw of an ensuing panic attack, especially in an episode almost designed for emotionality, is noticeably absent.
s) Not only has fish long been a drag tradition alongside other forms, but trans and drag discourses only separated in the past half-century or so. Passing has been a concern of both the trans community and drag circles as long as people have been ‘cross-dressing’. I have left the asterisks after ‘trans’ in this document for historical purposes.
t) Well, to the extent possible. Clearly the work of art does not exist in a vacuum.
u) In the period studied.
v) Greek choruses are often more liminal than this statement implies.
w) See proletariangothic et al. for the ableist underpinnings of a lot of cyborg discourse.
