Having a Voice, Hearing Voices

This short essay engages with the ambivalent (deterritorializing and reterritorializing) agency of vocal timbre. Timbre is too often understood as a stable corporeal marker of identity; rather, the article argues, it is better understood as a medium through which identity is performed. In particular, the essay concentrates on voice as able to express "structures of feelings" (Williams) and "politics of belonging" (Waltham-Smith) that complicate simplistic geographies, concentrating on the sociocultural area of the Mediterranean. Rather, the performance of vocal timbre "resists representation, and propose an affective economy [that is] intrinsically diasporic” (Chambers). This concept is then brought to its extreme implications by arguing that voice is the object of a radical form of "disidentification" (Muñoz).