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Mobile applications for transgender voice training seek to help trans people alter their speaking voices, often with the goal of alignment with one or another pole of binary gender expression (i.e., voice ‘feminization’ or ‘masculinization’). These apps offer instruction, audio tools and feedback mechanisms that allow users to record, evaluate and track their progress relative to a desired – and gendered – goal. As with digital technologies generally, however, these apps draw on and reproduce particular ideas of both the needs and capacities of imagined users and broader social and political phenomena – in this case, voice, gender expression and gender transition. In the following paper, we undertake a critical discourse analysis of five mobile voice training apps for transgender people. We find that rather than offering expansive or open-ended conceptions of gender, these apps reproduce ideals of gender as not only binary but also white, affluent and able-bodied. We also offer a critique of the apps’ characterization of transition as reifying the normative authority of clinical and technoscientific knowledge and conditioning ‘authenticity’ on an ability to conform to (racialized, classed and ableist) binary gender norms.

« La Sculpture comme symptôme » : voilà le titre donné à l’introduction de cet ouvrage par Philip Larratt-Smith, l’archiviste littéraire de Louise Bourgeois. Il s’agit aussi d’un thème récurrent dans les huit textes que contient le premier volume richement illustré de son étude psychanalytique de Louise Bourgeois et de son œuvre. Le second volume, illustré de photographies de l’artiste (de son plus jeune âge à ses quatre-vingt-dix ans passés), présente une sélection inédite de ses notes et c...