Becoming Spectral: Phantasmagorias of Late Capitalism and Trans Desubjectivity in Hyper-pop

Westley Montgomery is an academic, multidisciplinary artist, and PhD candidate at Stanford University who holds bachelor's and master's degrees in music from the University of Michigan. Westley's scholarly interests lie at the intersections of performance studies, sound studies, trans and gender studies, and Black studies. Westley's current work examines the relationships between the voice and technology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through four technologies—the Sonovox, the Synthesizer, the Vocoder, and Autotune—exploring how the voice acts as a site through which raced and gendered subjectivities are both reified and refused. Other scholarly interests include social media and streaming performance, Japanophilia in African American culture, and opera pedagogies and the construction of somatic difference.