I admit, I had no idea about the history of countertenors. It’s funny though, you can see how it gets missed. Most choirs find themselves inundated with women, which is why many of us end up singing tenor if we can manage it, but choirs are rarely at a loss for people to sing alto or soprano parts.

I hope you write more. These articles are positively delicious.

I honestly think Kurt’s character is an unalloyed good. He literally gives voice to the large number of gay/queer kids who have high-pitched voices and love show tunes but have been scorned by both the straight and gay communities because of general hostility to the cultural feminine. I kept thinking of a quote by Eve Sedgwick when I was writing about Kurt: “In dealing with an open secret structure, it’s only by being shameless about risking the obvious that we happen into the vicinity of the transformative.” Because Colfer’s performance is so brilliant, he has reclaimed the high-pitched voice for all boys, and he helps all of us better appreciate what we have been missing by not having a voice like his in the mainstream. From what I have observed regarding Colfer’s fandom, his popularity crosses all kinds of age/identity boundaries. I think it truly remarkable that kids can now grow up wanting to sing like Kurt, and I believe this will, in time, reduce the stigma surrounding voices like his.

I do feel, however, that it is also important that there are a variety of straight/gay/queer characters singing on the show, and that singing isn’t only aligned with gay men or even with one type of gay man. Singing is shown to be liberating for all young people, especially straight boys; critiquing the stigma attached to singing is one the core tenants of the show. Moreover, as Racheline suggests in her comment following yours, there are any number of gender-queer performances on Glee that continually disrupt social norms and gender/sex binaries. But more on that next week!

(And go boy sopranos!)

As a genderqueer, female-bodied person who can only wander near the upper parts of Colfer’s range on very good days with my voice teacher, it has been ridiculously pleasing to me to listen to a male voice that’s aspirational for me.

Glee, which is often incoherent about many issues, seems to make its most interesting choices about gender and queerness around music (the layers of potential meaning in the song they had Blaine sing in the prom episode, for example, is something I have to get around to writing about as soon as I have time), even as I’m not always a fan of how the show tends to under-utilize the musical format with often mundane justifications for performance.

However, I’m a bit troubled by the conflation of voice, gender, and sexuality that you disavow in the earlier parts of your post yet all but replicate later on. I think that the embracing and reappropriation of negative stereotypes is a powerful move yet requires complex negotiations. To be had, I fear that as much as Kurt and Colfer’s merging of queer empowerment, feminine diva embrace and the countertenor functions as an immensely strong statement, it simultaneously reinforces the voice/gender/sexuality conflation that could usefully be challenged.

[And I’m writing this only in part as mom to a teenage boy soprano who had chosen to perform Blackbird the week Kurt sang it and was certainly aware of the connotations his performance thus invoked. :)]