“In My Life”: Loving Queerly and Singing Across Generations
December 1975.
The cold winds staked their claim over Toronto, where my parents had recently arrived from the Philippines. They were underdressed and making their way down Parliament Street. Despite being warned of a shift in temperature, they were not expecting the brutal intensities of Canadian winter. I’m not sure how anyone anticipates the sharp sting of negative temperatures when they are arrivants used to tropical climates. Undeterred, my mother and father headed to a small Filipino grocer, hoping to encounter a semblance of domestic familiarity. Pressed against the biting winds, my mother abruptly stopped, looked at my father and said, “Tumutolo ang sipon” – you have a runny nose. To which my father replied, “Ikaw din” – you do too! They both started laughing and laughed again when they retold me this story 48 years later. When faced with the challenges of migrating to a new and very cold country, they managed to mine humour from a deep well of difficult circumstances. We had been listening to the song “In My Life” by the Beatles (Lennon & McCartney 1965). Something in its expression, melody, and feeling caused my parents to be transported to this small but important moment.
In her conversation with Christine Bacareza Balance, “‘Revolutions in Sound’: Keynote Duet” (2022) Alexandra T. Vazquez writes: “The popular…leaves so much room for engagement with sound artists (musicians without the gallery). None of them need theorists to argue for them, to argue for their mattering because to so many, they already do. How do they instead invite theorists to take part in something alongside them?” (12). I was never a big fan of the Beatles, but regardless of my opinions, they were popular. As a relentlessly oppositional teenager, I was put off by their mass popularity. As Vazquez suggests, despite one’s musical taste, songs are invitations, not scholarly conquests. The memory re-opened by my parents’ connection to “In My Life” was an invitation for me to take stock of the song’s affective and, for them, diasporic trajectories. As Balance (2022) suggests songs request us to “listen long so we hear where another is coming from” (15). For her, “long” describes temporality and commitment. To “listen long” implies that duration and attention are the pretext for empathic relations.
“In My Life” was released in 1965. My mother was fifteen years old when she first heard the song on the radio in a boarding house in Marbel, Philippines. One year later, on July 16, 1966 the Philippine Free Press would announce, “The Beatles Are Coming” (de Manila as cited by Robert Nery in “The Hero Takes a Walk” 2018). At that time, Ferdinand Marcos was the newly elected president of the Philippines, and Imelda Marcos was his First Lady. The Marcoses would later unleash an era of violent dictatorial power and impose Martial Law in 1972, escalating political suppression (Burns 2013). My mother recalls that the band’s first and only appearance in the Philippines was remembered by many less for their two scheduled concerts and more for their “snub” of Imelda. The Beatles were noticeably absent at a lunch reception they were expected to attend with the First Lady at the Presidential Palace. Their absence, attributed to a communication error between the concert promoter and the band’s manager, incited public disapproval and resulted in the sudden disappearance of their security escort and hotel and porter service. Unlike in other cities, the band was refused room service and was forced to carry their own luggage (Nery 2018).
What is striking about this moment is that it breaks from preoccupations with Filipinx desires for assimilation and mimicry of Western imperial projects. In Video Night in Kathmandu and Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East, British travel writer Pico Iyer (1988) famously stated that Filipinx people are the “[m]aster of every American gesture, conversant with every western song…the Filipino plays minstrel to the entire continent (153)” Turning against imperial scripts and the band’s documented disdain of “Mosquito City” and even worse, John Lennon’s comment that a return to the Philippines would require “an H-bomb,” the soured residues of their visit marks a queer rupture in Beatlemania. The public decried that Filipinx people deserved better from the band, capturing what Balance describes in Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America (2016), as “disobedience” in that “disavows a belief in the promises of assimilation” (5). For me, Filipinx non-compliance textures the sonic substance of “In My Life.” While the shadow of the Marcoses cronyism and corruption is an inescapable footnote, it is the defiant voices of hotel employees, dismayed fans, and airport workers that insisted on the “ordinariness” (Wofner & Smeaton, 2003) of the Beatles that holds the song’s queer decibels.
There are places I’ll remember all my life, though some have changed. Some forever, not for better. Some have gone, and some remain.
“In My Life” (Lennon & McCartney 1965).
January 2018.
I am sitting on my couch watching a Toronto Raptors game. The television emits light that flickers through a large window that frames a bright winter moon. I am 41 weeks pregnant at this point (feeling similarly shaped and sized as the moon outside). My stubborn queer resistance to the Beatles somehow dissipated during my pregnancy, and the song “In My Life” made its way to me. I would quietly sing the song to my pregnant belly. Then, that January night, I felt a snap inside my body and a rush of water down my legs. I won’t go into much gratuitous detail other than to say that at 12:49 pm the next day, Asa Cy Dyer-Mecija was born at home.
And these memories lose their meaning when I think of love as something new.
“In My Life” (Lennon & McCartney 1965)
Sometimes, I needed to couch the queerness of pregnancy in words that were not mine. The distance between these words and the ones I had yet to find would help to structure my unfolding love for Asa. Here, queerness presented a modality of encounter with uncensored desires. Queerness is often theorized as a utopian impulse; the queerness of my pregnancy jostled both the hopes and fears brought up by the unknown terrain of parenting amidst heteronormativity. For me, “In My Life” is riven by sentimentality and nostalgia, but it also gave melody to a tender relationship with myself and my new role in the world. This was the sonic throughline to my parents, a queer inheritance of tension made from the hopes for kinder contexts amidst the limitations of harsh realities.
December 2022.
I was invited to perform as part of the Queer Songbook Orchestra’s holiday fundraiser. The Queer Songbook Orchestra is a chamber pop ensemble that hosts an annual concert focused on songs and stories about “chosen family and queer joy” (Queer Songbook n.d.). At that time, Asa was four years old. He is a child of the pandemic. He’s a kid with two moms, a present and kind donor, and is dearly loved by his Lolo and Lola, his grandparents, aunts, titas, uncles, cousins, kuya, ate, and his beautiful chosen family. My partner, Hannah, and I sometimes worry about how his world will be affected by reactions to the makeup of our family, but mostly, we know he’ll be sure he’s loved by many.
To me, the song “In My Life” offers a useful sonic response to homophobia. As a baby, after Asa’s baths, I would often wrap him in a towel, and while rocking him back and forth, I would sing these lyrics from the song: “Though I know I’ll never lose affection for people and things that went before, I know I’ll often stop and think about them. In my life, I love you more” (Lennon & McCartney 1965). To me, this statement is a queer ethos. We know that 2SLGBTQ+ people have necessarily and creatively reworked and reimagined the organization and expression of kinship. When family is so often bounded by what Julianne Pidduck calls “constraints of relationality” in “Queer Kinship and Ambivalence”(2008: 441), the lyrics “In my life, I love you more” are a call to action. More is a word used comparatively to insist that there is something greater, something more exists, something more is possible. I embrace the challenge to love more. My queerness urges me to love more, and parenting Asa does, too. On the evening of the performance, indexed by my parents’ struggles and our shared disdain for the chill of winter, Asa and I performed “In My Life” together. The video of our performance will remain a treasured sonic archive that I will return to often, and as Asa gets older, I hope it reminds him of how beautiful he’s always been.
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Casey Mecija is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication & Media Studies at York University. Her current research examines sound as a mode of affective, psychic, and social representation, specifically in relation to diasporic experience. Drawing on sound studies, queer diaspora studies and Filipinx Studies, her research considers how sensorial encounters are enmeshed and disciplined by social and psychic conditions. In this work, she theorizes sounds made in and beyond Filipinx diaspora to make an argument about a “queer sound” that permeates diasporic sensibilities. She is also a musician and filmmaker whose work has received several accolades and has been presented internationally.
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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Blank Space and “Asymmetries of Childhood Innocence” –Casey Mecija
The Sound of What Becomes Possible: Language Politics and Jesse Chun’s 술래 SULLAE (2020) –Casey Mecija
The Cyborg’s Prosody, or Speech AI and the Displacement of Feeling–Dorothy Santos
Tape Hiss, Compression, and the Stubborn Materiality of Sonic Diaspora–Chris Chien
Xicanacimiento, Life-giving Sonics of Critical Consciousness—Esther Díaz Martín and Kristian E. Vasquez
Moonlight’s Orchestral Manoeuvers: A duet by Shakira Holt and Christopher Chien
Enacting Queer Listening, or When Anzaldúa Laughs–Maria Chaves Daza
Echoes in Transit: Loudly Waiting at the Paso del Norte Border Region—José Manuel Flores & Dolores Inés Casillas
The Queerness of Wham’s “Last Christmas”–Justin Burton
Could I Be Chicana Without Carlos Santana?–Wanda Alarcón
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The Cyborg’s Prosody, or Speech AI and the Displacement of Feeling
In summer 2021, sound artist, engineer, musician, and educator Johann Diedrick convened a panel at the intersection of racial bias, listening, and AI technology at Pioneerworks in Brooklyn, NY. Diedrick, 2021 Mozilla Creative Media award recipient and creator of such works as Dark Matters, is currently working on identifying the origins of racial bias in voice interface systems. Dark Matters, according to Squeaky Wheel, “exposes the absence of Black speech in the datasets used to train voice interface systems in consumer artificial intelligence products such as Alexa and Siri. Utilizing 3D modeling, sound, and storytelling, the project challenges our communities to grapple with racism and inequity through speech and the spoken word, and how AI systems underserve Black communities.” And now, he’s working with SO! as guest editor for this series (along with ed-in-chief JS!). It kicked off with Amina Abbas-Nazari’s post, helping us to understand how Speech AI systems operate from a very limiting set of assumptions about the human voice. Then, Golden Owens took a deep historical dive into the racialized sound of servitude in America and how this impacts Intelligent Virtual Assistants. Last week, Michelle Pfeifer explored how some nations are attempting to draw sonic borders, despite the fact that voices are not passports. Today, Dorothy R. Santos wraps up the series with a meditation on what we lose due to the intensified surveilling, tracking, and modulation of our voices. [To read the full series, click here] –JS
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In 2010, science fiction writer Charles Yu wrote a story titled “Standard Loneliness Package,” where emotions are outsourced to another human being. While Yu’s story is a literal depiction, albeit fictitious, of what might be entailed and the considerations that need to be made of emotional labor, it was published a year prior to Apple introducing Siri as its official voice assistant for the iPhone. Humans are not meant to be viewed as a type of technology, yet capitalist and neoliberal logics continue to turn to technology as a solution to erase or filter what is least desirable even if that means the literal modification of voice, accent, and language. What do these actions do to the body at risk of severe fragmentation and compartmentalization?
I weep.
I wail.
I gnash my teeth.
Underneath it all, I am smiling. I am giggling.
I am at a funeral. My client’s heart aches, and inside of it is my heart, not aching, the opposite of aching—doing that, whatever it is.
Charles Yu, “Standard Loneliness Package,” Lightspeed: Science Fiction & Fantasy, November 2010
Yu sets the scene by providing specific examples of feelings of pain and loss that might be handed off to an agent who absorbs the feelings. He shows us, in one way, what a world might look and feel like if we were to go to the extreme of eradicating and off loading our most vulnerable moments to an agent or technician meant to take on this labor. Although written well over a decade ago, its prescient take on the future of feelings wasn’t too far off from where we find ourselves in 2023. How does the voice play into these connections between Yu’s story and what we’re facing in the technological age of voice recognition, speech synthesis, and assistive technologies? How might we re-imagine having the choice to displace our burdens onto another being or entity? Taking a cue from Yu’s story, technologies are being created that pull at the heartstrings of our memories and nostalgia. Yet what happens when we are thrust into a perpetual state of grieving and loss?
Humans are made to forget. Unlike a computer, we are fed information required for our survival. When it comes to language and expression, it is often a stochastic process of figuring out for whom we speak and who is on the receiving end of our communication and speech. Artist and scholar Fabiola Hanna believes polyvocality necessitates an active and engaged listener, which then produces our memories. Machines have become the listeners to our sonic landscapes as well as capturers, surveyors, and documents of our utterances.
The past few years may have been a remarkable advancement in voice tech with companies such as Amazon and Sanas AI, a voice recognition platform that allows a user to apply a vocal filter onto any human voice, with a discernible accent, that transforms the speech into Standard American English. Yet their hopes for accent elimination and voice mimicry foreshadow a future of design without justice and software development sans cultural and societal considerations, something I work through in my artwork in progress, The Cyborg’s Prosody (2022-present).
The Cyborg’s Prosody is an interactive web-based artwork (optimized for mobile) that requires participants to read five vignettes that increasingly incorporate Tagalog words and phrases that must be repeated by the player. The work serves as a type of parody, as an “accent induction school” — providing a decolonial method of exploring how language and accents are learned and preserved. The work is a response to the creation of accent reduction schools and coaches in the Philippines. Originally, the work was meant to be a satire and parody of these types of services, but shifted into a docu-poetic work of my mother’s immigration story and learning and becoming fluent in American English.
Even though English is a compulsory language in the Philippines, it is a language learned within the parameters of an educational institution and not common speech outside of schools and businesses. From the call center agents hired at Vox Elite, a BPO company based in the Philippines, to a Filipino immigrant navigating her way through a new environment, the embodiment of language became apparent throughout the stages of research and the creative interventions of the past few years.
In Fall 2022, I gave an artist talk about The Cyborg’s Prosody to a room of predominantly older, white, cisgender male engineers and computer scientists. Apparently, my work caused a stir in one of the conversations between a small group of attendees. A couple of the engineers chose to not address me directly, but I overheard a debate between guests with one of the engineers asking, “What is her project supposed to teach me about prosody? What does mimicking her mom teach me?” He became offended by the prospect of a work that de-centered his language, accent, and what was most familiar to him.The Cyborg’s Prosody is a reversal of what is perceived as a foreign accented voice in the United States into a performance for both the cyborg and the player. I introduce the term western vocal drag to convey the caricature of gender through drag performance, which is apropos and akin to the vocal affect many non-western speakers effectuate in their speech.
The concept of western vocal drag became a way for me to understand and contemplate the ways that language becomes performative through its embodiment. Whether it is learning American vernacular to the complex tenses that give meaning to speech acts, there is always a failure or queering of language when a particular affect and accent is emphasized in one’s speech. The delivery of speech acts is contingent upon setting, cultural context, and whether or not there is a type of transaction occurring between the speaker and listener. In terms of enhancement of speech and accent to conform to a dominant language in the workplace and in relation to global linguistic capitalism, scholar Vijay A. Ramjattan states in that there is no such thing as accent elimination or even reduction. Rather, an accent is modified. The stakes are high when taking into consideration the marketing and branding of software such as Sanas AI that proposes an erasure of non-dominant foreign accented voices.
The biggest fear related to the use of artificial intelligence within voice recognition and speech technologies is the return to a Standard American English (and accent) preferred by a general public that ceases to address, acknowledge, and care about linguistic diversity and inclusion. The technology itself has been marketed as a way for corporations and the BPO companies they hire to mind the mental health of the call center agents subjected to racism and xenophobia just by the mere sound of their voice and accent. The challenge, moving forward, is reversing the need to serve the western world.
A transorality or vocality presents itself when thinking about scholar April Baker-Bell’s work Black Linguistic Consciousness. When Black youth are taught and required to speak with what is considered Standard American English, this presents a type of disciplining that perpetuates raciolinguistic ideologies of what is acceptable speech. Baker-Bell focuses on an antiracist linguistic pedagogy where Black youth are encouraged to express themselves as a shift towards understanding linguistic bias. Deeply inspired by her scholarship, I started to wonder about the process for working on how to begin framing language learning in terms of a multi-consciousness that includes cultural context and affect as a way to bridge gaps in understanding.
Or, let’s re-think this concept or idea that a bad version of English exists. As Cathy Park Hong brilliantly states, “Bad English is my heritage…To other English is to make audible the imperial power sewn into the language, to slit English open so its dark histories slide out.” It is necessary for us all to reconfigure our perceptions of how we listen and communicate that perpetuates seeking familiarity and agreement, but encourages respecting and honoring our differences.
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Featured Image: Still from artist’s mock-up of The Cyborg’s Prosody(2022-present), copyright Dorothy R. Santos
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Dorothy R. Santos, Ph.D. (she/they) is a Filipino American storyteller, poet, artist, and scholar whose academic and research interests include feminist media histories, critical medical anthropology, computational media, technology, race, and ethics. She has her Ph.D. in Film and Digital Media with a designated emphasis in Computational Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz and was a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow. She received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts and holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco. Her work has been exhibited at Ars Electronica, Rewire Festival, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the GLBT Historical Society.
Her writing appears in art21, Art in America, Ars Technica, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, Slate, and Vice Motherboard. Her essay “Materiality to Machines: Manufacturing the Organic and Hypotheses for Future Imaginings,” was published in The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture. She is a co-founder of REFRESH, a politically-engaged art and curatorial collective and serves as a member of the Board of Directors for the Processing Foundation. In 2022, she received the Mozilla Creative Media Award for her interactive, docu-poetics work The Cyborg’s Prosody (2022). She serves as an advisory board member for POWRPLNT, slash arts, and House of Alegria.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Your Voice is (Not) Your Passport—Michelle Pfeifer
“Hey Google, Talk Like Issa”: Black Voiced Digital Assistants and the Reshaping of Racial Labor–Golden Owens
Beyond the Every Day: Vocal Potential in AI Mediated Communication –Amina Abbas-Nazari
Voice as Ecology: Voice Donation, Materiality, Identity–Steph Ceraso
The Sound of What Becomes Possible: Language Politics and Jesse Chun’s 술래 SULLAE (2020)—Casey Mecija
Look Who’s Talking, Y’all: Dr. Phil, Vocal Accent and the Politics of Sounding White–Christie Zwahlen
Listening to Modern Family’s Accent–Inés Casillas and Sebastian Ferrada
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