Conference Agenda

This paper examines three songs by transfeminine hyperpop artist Cleo McKenzie (aka TAMAGOTCHI MASSACRE). Spanning her 2020 mixtape and 2022 debut album, the songs in question form a three-part conceptual arc unified by a shared melody and autobiographical lyrics. They differ significantly, however, in vocal timbre due to post-production application of glitch aesthetics via noise, distortion, and pitch and formant shifting. I analyze the way McKenzie uses distinct, heavily processed vocal timbres in these songs to chronicle aspects of her life as a trans woman, sonically telegraphing experiences of gender dysphoria (“MFW MIRRORZ :3 :P xD”), hormone replacement therapy (“i’m two years on hormones and i’m still sad i want a refund”), and an evolving self-image (“mirrorsong*”).

I examine McKenzie's approach to vocal production through glitch studies as articulated by critical media theorists Andrew Brooks, Rosa Menkman, and Legacy Russell, as well as the taxonomy of approaches to glitch art as described by critical art historian Michael Betancourt, and discussions of vocal timbre and noise by Zachary Wallmark and Jacques Attali. This is buttressed by an interview with McKenzie that explores her production techniques and personal experiences of gender transition. I place McKenzie’s vocal aesthetic in dialogue with discourses on transhumanism and Arnie Cox’s mimetic hypothesis, arguing that listeners empathetically embody these heavily processed vocal timbres, though they exist at the limits of our ability to physically reproduce them. I argue that through technological manipulation of the voice, artists may pursue a fuller expression of the self (particularly with regards to gender expression) through what I call “transhuman timbres.”

In the penultimate scene of I Saw the TV Glow –– a trans coming-of-age film –– the main character, Owen, slices open his chest to reveal a glowing TV screen inside. A dissonant sonic cloud, cast in electronic tones, dissolves into consonant euphoria as possibilities of Owen’s intra-action with technology materialize, the screen flipping through potential channels/futures. The technologization of bodies in horror film has historically Othered queer coded perspectives by revealing the technologized “human” body as deserving of fear or destruction, standing in for the queer Other (The Day the Earth Stood Still, Alien, etc.). Contrarily, I Saw the TV Glow (2024) centers trans realities and opens possibilities for queer becoming by sonically drawing and redrawing the boundaries between the human and non-human, suggesting more-than-human electro-acoustics.

Combining queer and posthuman theories of becoming articulated by Barad (2007), Steinbock (2009), and Braidotti (2002, 2019), I show how the music in I Saw the TV Glow displays a somatechnical –– referring to the inextricable boundedness of the human body and technology –– method of queer becoming through its electro-acoustic music. I read the film’s music as affirmation of trans futurity through Barad’s agential realist view of diffraction patterns, “patterns of difference that make a difference”, and possibilities for somatechnical queer becomings. To demonstrate this, I analyze how the electro-acoustic music acts as sonic discourse to create, recreate, and blur the boundary between acoustic and electronic sound, representing Owen’s body and technology, respectively. This sonic discourse confirms the film’s affirmation of a queer agential realism in which becoming is intra-actively enacted by human and non-human agents. In scenes depicting gender euphoria and dysphoria, I identify connections between euphoric musical affect and the diffractive possibilities of intra-activity; these connections supports the technologized, intra-active queer becoming at the heart of Schoenbrun’s film.

By viewing I Saw the TV Glow through these lenses, I draw attention to a burgeoning affirmative shift in filmic portrayals of trans materiality and the technologization of bodies. Such affirmations center and offer opportunities for reconfiguring trans realities and futures, “kick[ing] back” against growing anti-transgender sentiment in the Western world.

While trans* studies and video game studies have seen increasing crossover in the past several years, research into how video game music interacts with narratives around Trans* trauma and identity in video games remains largely scant. In this paper, I examine Novectale’s The House in Fata Morgana (2012, hereafter referred to as Fata Morgana) through the intersecting lenses of Trans* studies and ludomusicology, framed from a Japanese Gothic perspective. Written by Hanada Keika, Fata Morgana is a visual novel (VN), a genre of interactive fiction that relies largely on prose and static imagery to present a story to the player. The player bears witness to and selectively interacts with the spectres of the titular house’s prior residents, spanning vast distances in space and time. I argue that the affordances of the VN genre, narrative framing via non-linear gothic vignettes, seemingly endless haunting musical themes, and the use of visceral sound effects collectively enable Fata Morgana to present players with a unique opportunity to examine the ways in which Trans* experiences and trauma intersect and shape our perceptions of the past, present, and future using the Haunted House and Specter as metaphors to reflect the embodied and phantasmic Trans* experiences. Fata Morgana’s 65-track score composed by Mellok’n, Gao, Tsutsumi Yusuke, Moriya Takaki, and Razuna Aikawa transgresses the boundary between game and reality through its extensive use of ghostly vocal music and stark shifts between melancholy, jubilation, and horror. I utilize and expand upon Isabella van Elferen’s analysis of gothic music in games, highlighting the spectral and liturgical voices that saturate Fata Morgana, tying them to Charles Shiro Inouye’s concept of “bivalent ambiguity. ” Furthermore, the paper brings into consideration developments in Trans* and queer discourses in Japan and how they are realized in video games and their music, complicating straightforward examinations of “Western Gothic” vs “Japanese Gothic.”