My Vibrant Voice Story: Fictocritical Fragments in Audio and Writing

Abstract

My Vibrant Voice Story is a fictocritical tissue of three audio and eight writing pieces that examines notions of 'voice', 'identity' and 'autobiography'. Its fragmented storyline circles the changing subject positions and voices of an 'I' who has been transgressing the boundaries of discrete gender and academic disciplines while producing an autobiography of voice. The paper combines self-narration and creative writing with a critical inquiry into medico-scientific normativity and deconstructive accounts of notions of 'subject', 'speaking', 'listening' and 'writing'. The traditional understanding of the human voice as an instrument that 'reveals essential clues about who we are' (Karpf, 2006) is destabilised, its ethical issues are disclosed and it is replaced with a notion of a 'plurivocality' that cannot be mastered (Derrida in McDonald, 1985).