Treating performativity as a framework within which performance necessarily takes place facilitates an approach to sung gender expression and affectation without recourse to Abbate’s binary between essentialism devoid of agency and deceptive ‘masks’. ‘Gender trouble’ is no more or less performative than normative gender, it is simply a transgression of the social expectations to which sexed bodies are bound. More importantly, to confuse performance and performativity is to miss Butler’s central point, which is that all gender, or rather everyone’s gender is performative. It is this problem that catches Carolyn Abbate’s discussion of the film Mascara at an impasse between essentialist ‘sex’ and a deceptive framework of ‘masks that can be assumed’. Any terminological slippage between ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ in this instance would misleadingly imply that she performs some sort of drag. Hegarty’s voice reifies her femininity through this sense of performative social contract with the listener. (3) Hegarty’s vocal performance hinges around this interplay of transfeminine production and reception. (2) critics have focussed on the gender ambiguity of her voice in overtly sensuous terms of beauty and fragility and (1) Hegarty has curated her vocal style through the influence of an eclectic combination of singers whose vocal gender presentations often deviate from the norms of mezzo-soprano woman or baritone man Nevertheless, the combined overviews of Hegarty’s press reception and self-proclaimed influences suggest that: The racial politics of the Simone comparison are beyond the scope of this essay.

In an interview with Dazed magazine, she lists ‘the songs that made her the person she is today’, and Simone featured twice amid a genealogy of varied vocal gender expression, from Klaus Nomi’s highly affected countertenor, to Alison Moyet’s bluesy contralto, or Diamanda Galás’s avant-garde screams. The comparison with Nina Simone is a particularly frequent one, which Hegarty seems to embrace. Ludovic Hunter-Tilney writes of a ‘voluptuous, baroque’ voice where ‘gender boundaries melt’ into ‘echoes of Boy George’s high tones and Nina Simone’s low ones’. She is almost ubiquitously described as ‘androgynous’. Critics have described her ‘beautiful, quavering falsetto’ as ‘beguilingly high-pitched’, ‘liminal’, ‘ethereal’, and what ‘a radiant, healing crystal’ might sound like. Hegarty’s positive embracing of gender ambiguity maps onto her vocal production in manifold ways.

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