Published in Zenith! Undergraduate Research Journal for the Humanities, Issue 5. This research was self-guided, in conversation with peer Ian Partman.
Abstract: My article tracks the queer relations to genre and vocality embodied by contemporary hyperpop duo, 100 gecs. I argue that 100 gecs initiates a nomadic approach to genre through absurdism and parody. Furthermore, I describe how 100 gecs’ use of vocal modulation resists gender’s construction of the masculine and feminine voice. I conclude with a meditation on “gec” feminism that attempts to follow the ethic of hyperpop for articulating a wacky, yet subversive genre of (un-)academic writing. My investigation of 100 gecs’ album, 1000 gecs and The Tree of Clues, is a cross-disciplinary exercise in queer theory, gender studies, musicology, art history, and philosophy; it primarily contributes to queer theory discourses on genre, gender, art, and the body.
In other words, to attribute radicalism to the inhabiting of a gender performance that does not align with the singer’s assumed sex requires an intelligible production of sex. The radicalism of the “gec 2 Ü” voice has nothing to do with the artist; following Butler’s concept of gender as performative and my theorization of technological presence and absence, we must locate “gender” in songs themselves rather than in singers. It is exactly the “gec 2 Ü” voice’s act of “betweenness” via the temporal crossings of masculine and feminine that initiates radically ungoverned gender potentials.
“The ‘Gec-Effect,'” pg. 20
Miles Luce 