Becoming queen: voices, bodies, and technologies in drag lip-sync performance

Thesis

Lip-syncing is foundational to drag performance. While it may have had rather humble beginnings, responding to exigencies of frugality rather than artistry, drag lip-syncing has become a highly refined and stylised mode of performance, but also one that has been left relatively unexamined. This thesis seeks to interrogate drag lip-sync performance from a variety of angles, providing solid theoretical frameworks for how lip-syncing functions as well as its unique attraction and self-actualising benefits for the performing queen. To this end, I split the thesis into four sections – The Silent Voice, The Imaginary Voice, The Material Voice, and The Queer Voice – and draw my conclusions through the help of five London-based drag queens: ShayShay, Rodent, Sue, Bougie, and Ruby. I begin by looking at lip-syncing’s theoretical importance to voice studies, arguing that lip-syncing evidences a special type of “silent voice”, a voice that is generated through silence, and also a voice that reflects the extimate silence of all speech acts. In the second section, I am more concerned with why drag queens choose to lip-sync, and what benefits it holds for the queen. Through psychoanalytical and ethnographic work, I argue for a complex series of identifications that take place, across multiple bodies and voices. The third section attends to the affective materiality of lip-syncing, first by theorising the necessity of loud sound in lip-sync performance and an attendant type of listening I coin as “haptic aurality”, and second by exploring the limits of the body in lip-syncing through an analysis of a performance by ShayShay. Finally, I turn to the queer voice – a voice that speaks queerly in its structure, but also to queer people through affective ties of memory and sound. Ultimately, this thesis seeks to uncover what lip-syncing can teach us about more typical acts of voicing, and also to make clear the abundant variety of ways in which drag queens use lip-syncing creatively in order to gain confidence and self-surety. As such, lip-syncing is conceived of throughout as, at base, a political act. Lip-syncing is a site of relation, an active creative process, and one that aids the performing queen in a constant process of becoming.

Authors: Bird, JM

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-bmjwrp2mj
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Queer theory; Lip-syncing; Performance studies; Phenomenology; Synchrony; Psychoanalysis; Lipsynching; Drag queen
• Subjects: Queer theory; Musicology