12. I Can't Seem to Place that Voice: Perspective, Poetics, and Pathos
And yet, recall the video clip of Jovanna, whose voice is both distinctive and consequential in the story of her experience—and yet, unavailable to be transcribed into print. Her voice is an apt reminder both of the limitations and ethical hazards of transcribed and edited voice and of where voice "lives" as an idea and as an experience.
Liberty's sister Jovanna is a person with a set of experiences (and as such, with a potential story to tell), with the means to make sounds, but no words. Jovanna's audible voice invokes her body, her presence, her person. In a poorly lit room, it is the voice of a young woman who has no words and yet seems to want to be heard.
And yet, "No words, guys. No words."
You might say that, even though Jovanna has a physical voice—she has vocal apparatus—she has no voice that does the work that we imagine voice does (as is evident in our metaphorical understandings of voice): define an individual, assert agency, claim power, or announce a meaning-making, "authorial" presence. To the extent that Jovanna's voice carries meaning even without words, it is a meaning intelligible only to those closest to her. In having her voice rendered for a public audience, she is doubly "spoken for"—first by the family members who may understand the actions invited by her vocal cues, and secondly, by the researcher–author, who creates from her a character.
Recall how Deborah Brandt (2001) and Kathleen Stewart (1996) made ethical choices around the representation of the voices of their research participants: Brandt chose to edit out the indicators of marked and socially stigmatized speech; Stewart used poetic transcription strategies to edit her participants' speech in order to create a sense of distinctiveness and authenticity around the speech of the stigmatized group under study. Both were motivated by the desire to print records on the page that would persuade audiences for their studies of the integrity of their research participants' voices—and therefore, of the integrity of the participants themselves. But as we view and listen to Liberty's footage of Jovanna, we are motivated to ask: What might Brandt and Stewart do with Jovanna's voice?
Given what we understand to be the terms of the representational bargains made by each, we would imagine that for Brandt, in keeping with her expressed mission to normalize the language of her interviewees, she would have had no choice but to edit Jovanna's voice entirely from the transcript. As a vocal event evacuated of semantic (though not pragmatic) content, it is untranscribable. Ironically, Jovanna would become either a scenic element, not a human agent, or would become a character in absentia: The idea of Jovanna would explain Liberty's actions more than the actual presence of a living, breathing, mute Jovanna. Liberty would be talking as if Jovanna were there.
By contrast, Stewart's strategy would, we believe, not allow her to edit Jovanna's voice out entirely. Stewart's approach to representing the speech she hears is to render a poetics of voice; however, recall that her choices to avoid othering follow a path of intervention that is not wholly unrelated to Brandt's. Rather than elevate the dialect as Brandt does, Stewart elevates the original dialect generically to a more formal presentation: a poetics. If Stewart treated Jovanna's voice like the other voices in her study, she would have to honor the phonetic events those voices produce. So Jovanna's voice, an auditory event, would become rendered as phonetic representations such as /aaaaa/ and /hhhh/. While it might preserve the physical qualities of Jovanna's auditory products, such a transcription would not render her voice as one of a group, who, while not enjoying a privileged social status, might be (ethically and rhetorically) redeemed by its folksy poetics—a poetics that Stewart does not apply to her own narrated voice. We don't know, for example, whether, in the conversational events in which Stewart represents herself as an interlocutor, she did, in fact, adjust to the local speech variety, or whether she continued to speak to her conversants in a more standard voice more aligned with her authorial voice.
That Jovanna has a physical voice, but none of the privileges of voicing, reveals the complicated relationship of physical/aural voice to metaphorical voice and authorial/editorial choice. It reminds us of what can only be seen by hearing.