Voicing Challenge: Trans* Singers and the Performance of Vocal Gender

This paper investigates the impact of trans* singers on the discursive framework of the gendered systematizations in classical singing, focusing on the opera industry and its casting and voice classifications. Whereas research on voice and gender has been a part of New Musicology for the past two and a half decades, inquiries into, e.g., cross-casting have largely happened against a backdrop of binary gender norms and have not prominently considered trans* voices and trans* identities. This paper investigates the current presentation of trans* voices within opera through press coverage, casting practices, and self-statements and engages with materials on three singers as a qualitative sample. Narrative patterns are singled out and applied to questions of gender in opera, thinking of trans* singers as a vital part of the equation and coming to the result that, while opera has always had spaces that move beyond cisgender norms, opera singing is still strongly guarded by binary gender conventions. A stronger presence of trans* voices throws these conventions into stark light and allows challenging ideas of normative gender performativity in opera and beyond, though it also raises ethical concerns regarding the instrumentalization of marginalized identities in theoretical discourse.