Immaterial Boys / Immaterial Girls - Gender, Expression, and Technologies through SOPHIE

Immaterial Boys/Immaterial Girls - Gender, Expression, and Technologies through SOPHIE Kate Fittinghoff Dissertation MA Contemporary Art Theory Visual Cultures Goldsmiths, University of London Advised by Anthony Faramelli

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Contents Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………….......……..3 Images………………………………………………………………………….....…………...……….4 I.

Introduction………………………………………………………………………….....……...5

II.

Whole New World…………………………………………………………………….…..…...9

III.

Product…………………………………………………………………………..………..…..17

IV.

Immaterial…………………………………………………………………………..…...……22

V.

Faceshopping………………………………………………………………………….….…..28

VI.

Just Like We Never Said Goodbye……………………………………………………..….…32

Bibliography………………………………………………………………………….....……………..34 Discography and Images………………………………………………..…………………………......38

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For SOPHIE. May her memory be a revolution.

And for all queer and trans people who dream of an Immaterial world.

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Images, clockwise from top left: still from SOPHIE’s music video “It’s Okay to Cry”; still from SOPHIE’s music video “Faceshopping”; promotional photo for SOPHIE compilation album ‘PRODUCT’; album art for SOPHIE’s ‘PRODUCT’ singles, SOPHIE performing at performing at Heaven, London, UK on March 13, 2018; cover art for ‘Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides Non-Stop Remix Album’.

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Immaterial Boys/Immaterial Girls - Gender, Expression, and Technologies through SOPHIE “Immaterial”, a song by Scottish electronic producer and DJ, SOPHIE, dreams of an electronic, queer, utopia. The eighth track on SOPHIE’s only solo full-length album, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, “Immaterial” was co-produced with her1 brother, Benny Long, and features vocals from Cecile Believe and Banoffee. Beginning with a fast paced, rhythmic clapping, a modulated chant of “Immaterial Girls, Immaterial Boys” fades into the hyperelectronic melody, with synthesizers fading in and out, coming together and harmonizing until you hear a sudden pop of the melody coming at you in full volume. When the beat finally drops some 30 seconds later, to the listener, it feels like catharsis. The experience of hearing it in a packed, sweaty venue, surrounded by people breathing in sync to the song feels transcendent, as if you’ve all been soaring higher and higher into the sky until you suddenly break through the cloud layer. The vocals come in soon after the beat drop, singing, “We're just, im-ma-ma-material, immaterial, immaterial boys, immaterial girls.”2 The voice SOPHIE uses for the song sounds nearly artificially feminine, obviously pitched up to an almost impossible frequency, as if she is speaking to you from some inhuman realm.

You could be me and I could be you Always the same and never the same Day by day, life after life Without my legs or my hair Without my genes or my blood With no name and with no type of story Where do I live?

Tell me, where do I exist?

We're just...

Im-ma-ma-material, immaterial Immaterial boys, immaterial girls Im-ma-ma-material, immaterial We're just, im-ma-ma-material (I could be anything I want) Immaterial, immaterial boys (anyhow, anywhere)

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For this paper, we will be referring to SOPHIE with she/her pronouns. As a public figure, SOPHIE generally preferred not to comment on her identity—instead she emphasized in her appearances to the press to let her work speak for itself. In interviews with and features on SOPHIE since her coming out as transfeminine, the press has dominantly referred to her with she/her pronouns. Since her death, one representative has stated to Pitchfork that she “preferred not to use gendered or nonbinary pronouns”, (Jazz Monroe, “SOPHIE Has Died”, Pitchfork. January 30th, 2021. https://pitchfork.com/news/sophie-has-died/) though that has only been confirmed posthumously through a single source, and it was not elaborated who this representative was or from where they represented her. In an effort to honor the pronouns she has directly affirmed while she was alive, I will be using she/her when referring to SOPHIE. 2 “SOPHIE – Immaterial,” Genius, accessed August 21, 2021, https://genius.com/Sophie-immaterial-lyrics.

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Immaterial girls (any place, anyone that I want)3 The song’s lyrics imagine an immaterial world: one in which we can exchange identities, switch lives, depart from our bodies and histories, and exist somewhere beyond life as we know it now. It dials in on the deep want that comes with being true to oneself, the longing desire to express how you feel and who you are fully and unabashedly. The refrain that echoes past her chant of “Immaterial” articulates the feeling: I can be anything I want, anyhow, anywhere, any place, anyone that I want.

When she first started her DJ career, SOPHIE was performing anonymously, producing under a pseudonym, rarely giving interviews, and never showing her face in her performances; instead she focused her work on putting the production first, crafting hyperproduced rhythms and beats that forced the listener to acknowledge the invisible but integral hand of the producer. For the years leading up to her debut, SOPHIE was immaterial, without a body to ground her work in physical space. She only existed sonically, dropping songs like “Lemonade” and “Vyzee”, which utilized her hallmark ‘hyperpop’ mode of production to implode pop music from the inside: crashing over the listener with highly produced, stimulating rhythms, putting the production front and center as the star of the music. The songs felt like a new frontier of pop production—they demanded that the genre moved faster, sounded louder, and felt more intense than ever before. The album covers of each of her singles also hinted at their plasticity, their inherent produced-ness: her first six singles featured computer generated images of water slides, each placed over a white background, which were later compiled into her debut compilation album, Product.

Embracing the synthetic, the album was made available to purchase in ‘silicon bubble cases’ and was accompanied by a conceptual ‘silicon product’—a black, shiny, double ended dildo with the word SOPHIE emblazoned on the base.4 Meanwhile, the producer herself was nowhere to be seen, shying away from any kind of pop-figure stardom that feels so inherent to the genre. Early coverage on SOPHIE’s sets reported her tongue-in-cheek response to pop personas; for her Boiler Room set in 2013, she sent out drag performer Ben Woozy to mix at the turntables as she stood off to the side, disguised as a security guard.5 Her and frequent collaborator AG Cook 6 produced a pop avatar of their own for a project titled QT, represented on stage by singer and artist Hayden Dunham. The project walked the line between performance art and marketing stunt; her debut was accompanied by a bubbly, effervescent song titled “Hey QT” and an 3

“SOPHIE – Immaterial,” Genius, accessed August 21, 2021, https://genius.com/Sophie-immaterial-lyrics.

Jeremy Gordon, “SOPHIE Releasing Singles Collection With ‘Silicon Product’ (That Sure Looks Like a Sex Toy),” Pitchfork (Condé Nast, September 29, 2015), https://pitchfork.com/news/61411-sophie-releasing-singles-collection-with-silicon-product-that-sure-looks-li ke-a-sex-toy/.

5 El Hunt, “Remembering Sophie, the Once-in-a-Generation Artist Who Changed Pop Music Forever,” The Forty-Five, February 1, 2021, https://thefortyfive.com/opinion/sophie-obituary-1986-2021/.

6 A graduate of Goldsmiths’ own Music Computing BA. 4

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equally bubbly and effervescent canned soft drink called “QT Energy Elixir” that was distributed at SXSW.7 The music video for “Hey QT” plays with many tropes of pop iconography; shaded in soft tones of pink and blue, Dunham is seen in a kind of idol production lab, wearing a piece of haptic face technology and inspecting and adjusting various graphs and charts on a touch screen, gesturing toward the amount of production that goes into creating a pop star. The project plays with the expectations that come with pop idols, asking where we draw the line between the organic and manufactured figure, art and marketing, producer and distributor.

After years of releasing music anonymously, toying with the public’s conception of who gets to be a pop producer and how, SOPHIE finally stepped onto the stage herself and revealed the person behind the production. In the same bold stroke, she came out as transfeminine, finally wearing her identity proudly and showing her face, making her first face-to-face appearance in the music video to her song “It’s Okay To Cry”. As the music video opened, she appeared in frame from the shoulders up, eyes downcast and skin illuminated pink against the background of a dark night. For her styling, her curly, crimson hair was left down in a long, voluminous bob, lips glossy and pink with the slightest suggestion of eye makeup. Her cheekbones had been prosthetically exaggerated, giving her face extra dimension and an almost alien kind of femininity to her features. All parts of her appearance in the video feel deliberately playful, tying together natural expression and a hyper-stylized, exaggerated kind of beauty, at once both recognizable and subtlety unique. As the song begins, a twinkling melody starts to play in the background; a soft breathy inhale pulls into the opening lyrics. As SOPHIE looks up and begins to sing, confirming that she is using her own voice for the first time in her own production, the background begins to illuminate pink, showing clouds parting and the sun rising in the distance. “I don't mean to reproach you by saying this,” she sings, “I know that scares you / All of the big occasions you might have missed / No, I accept you / And I don't even need to know your reasons / It's okay, it's okay, it's okay / I think you sometimes forget I would know you best / I hope you don't take this the wrong way / But I think your inside is your best side.”8 When the sun finally emerges in the background as the chorus crests through the song, SOPHIE breaks into a deep, comforted smile and a rainbow materializes in the background. As the song progresses, she begins to move—dancing, singing, and making direct eye contact to the camera before glancing above and below. About halfway through the song, around the second chorus, she tosses her arms up and reveals a small, estrogen-enhanced breast. If there was any question about the meaning of

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​Sasha Geffen, “PC Music's Inverted Consumerism,” Pitchfork (Pitchfork, March 30, 2015), https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/714-pc-musics-inverted-consumerism/.

8 “SOPHIE – It’s Okay to Cry,” Genius, accessed August 21, 2021, https://genius.com/Sophie-its-okay-to-cry-lyrics.

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her song before, it is now thrown into startling clarity: SOPHIE is ready to express her authentic identity, and she is speaking to all other queer people to step into the sunlight with her.

For the final chorus, she is cast on top of a swirling, starry galaxy, looking directly into camera and singing: “I, was that a teardrop in your eye? / I never thought I'd see you cry / Just know whatever hurts, it's all mine / It's okay to cry (it's okay to cry) / I can see the truth through all the lies / And even after all this time / Whatever it is just know it's alright / It's okay to cry (it's okay to cry).”9 The song is a stunning gesture towards the collective, complex emotions that come with coming out—as SOPHIE encourages the listener and anyone who is struggling with their identity to express themselves fully and recognize their true identity, she is finally putting her emotions out herself, showing her face and singing to the camera.

SOPHIE’s mode of music production—embracing a silicon, latex-covered, highly and markedly produced sound, pushing the genre of pop past its own limits, is intrinsically tied to her transfeminine identity and the expression of her queerness, and is expressed both implicitly and explicitly in her music.

Reading into and in-between the SOPHIE project, which encompasses not only her production but also her album visuals, music videos, lyrics, photo shoots, and live performances, we can look to see how she utilizes technology and electronic music to express her understanding of her own queerness. The SOPHIE project ties together a complex conversation between gender, materiality, expression, and technology, emphasized not only through the stunning visuals that accompanied her music videos, photoshoots, and stage performances, but also through the music itself, with its layered production, modulated voices, and esoteric lyrics. SOPHIE utilizes digital technologies to express her identity as a queer and transfeminine person, using plasticky synths and hyperkinetic production to articulate feelings which exist in the realm of the synthetic and immaterial. Through SOPHIE, we can see the ways in which electronic music can become a powerful tool to unite and express complex feelings of queerness, gender, emotion, and materiality through the collective imagining of the nightclub space.

This research project will be presented in four sections, each titled with a SOPHIE song and evaluating a certain aspect of the SOPHIE project. Beginning with ‘Whole New World’, we will lay out the theories of queerness which come together to define the term as it is being used both in this research project and, as argued, by and through the SOPHIE project itself. These aspects cover recent queer theory beginning with the term’s usage within the LGBTQIA+ community in the 1980s-90s and move into its political, technological, and liberatory functions today. In the section ‘Product’ we will evaluate other theoretical concepts which will be utilized throughout the essay, specifically Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘assemblages’ and how it can be used to express a queer experience and embodiment, and also 9

“SOPHIE – It’s Okay to Cry,” Genius, accessed August 21, 2021, https://genius.com/Sophie-its-okay-to-cry-lyrics.

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understand the functioning of the multiplicity of the SOPHIE project. Using authors Donna Haraway, Jasbir Puar, and Reese Simpkins, we look at the ways the postmodern body functions as an assemblage through its use of technologies, and how we can read that assemblage through the lens of social identities such as queerness. The next section, ‘Immaterial’, looks at how materiality is addressed in SOPHIE’s work, and considers what SOPHIE means when she imagines an ‘immaterial’ world. Reading through theories of posthumanism and cyberfeminism, we can see how technologies such as music production can extend the expression of the body and the self past its material limits, a queer project which reaches into immaterial spaces to express an internality that can often feel inaccessible. In the section titled ‘Faceshopping’, we look at the body as a site of intersecting technologies, and consider how queer bodies utilize technologies of gender and expression to deviate from cisheterosexual modes. Jumping off of Paul B. Preciado’s notion of the body as a “technorganic interface”, we look at SOPHIE’s articulation of her transition as a synthesis between ‘synthetic’ and ‘organic’, a way of breaking the boundaries of preconceived notions of gender and of marrying her physical embodiment with her digital modes of production, as well as considering the liberatory function of that kind of understanding. We also evaluate SOPHIE’s investigation of materiality and her idea of ‘synthesizing the real’ as tying together her body and embodied technologies, reading that through Magrit Shildrick’s essay on the identificatory process of utilizing prosthetics. The SOPHIE project ties together incredibly complex ideas of gender, expression, technologies, and queerness, and this paper hopes to begin to deconstruct and understand her message through the lens of relevant theorists and visual cultures.

WHOLE NEW WORLD The last track on Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides is the song “Whole New World/Pretend World”, which opens with a characteristic, glitched-out pop SOPHIE beat. The nine minute song immediately ungrounds the listener by submerging them under an unforgiving, relentless rhythm, hypersonic elements, and unconventional song structure. The production alone feels otherworldly; sounds that resemble car tires screeching, robotic breathing, sonic feedback, and metallic clanging come together to disorient the listener and completely unmoor them from the normal expectations that come with pop music. The vocals, sung by Cecile Believe, are the one beacon of orientation SOPHIE provides to ground the song, a single element for the listener to latch onto; but even then they take a twist. As the track progresses, Cecile Believe’s refrain of “whole new world” goes through pitch distortions that travel up and down the vocal register, often teetering on the edge of an alien incomprehensibility. Calling out through the crashes, clangs, blips, and beeps, Cecile Believe nears a shout, saying, “I looked into your eyes / I thought that I

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could see a whole new world”.10 It feels like she is addressing the listener directly; there is no other vocalist for her to be referring to and the rhythm is made of inhuman, unresponsive clanging and clashing.

She sucks you into the alien landscape of the song by reaching for you through the lyrics.

In SOPHIE’s music, through the visuals and products and performances that encompass her project, and through the eyes of her pop-music peers, artistic collaborators, and queer siblings, SOPHIE imagines a whole new world. The world she creates has echoes of what is familiar—her persona taking on recognizable tropes of pop-idol stardom, her merchandise and stage costumes using the plasticky, synthetic materials that have become ubiquitous to everyday life, and her production remixing, stretching, and rearranging the format of the sugary-sweet pop songs that can be found on any top music chart, SOPHIE reels you in with her shiny, sparkly, latex aesthetic and then projects you out into something deeply unfamiliar. It is no coincidence that the cover of Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides and the accompanying press photos has SOPHIE sitting in a purple-tinted, shiny, reflective pool; her music often feels like you’ve plunged into the deep end of some foreign body of water, submerged deep below the surface and into an otherworldly environment.

The world SOPHIE constructs is simultaneously dreamily utopic and terrifyingly alien, undoubtedly influenced by the gender transition that she began to undertake while creating her album.

Through Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, she projects a vision of a queer, sonic world, ungrounded in materiality but instead populated with intimacy, feeling, and sound. SOPHIE’s ‘whole new world’ imagines something far from the material embodiment that we experience in our everyday lives, instead using disembodied technologies to craft a kind of sonic utopia. The body, in the SOPHIE project, becomes another piece of technology, extended upon by synths, drum machines, plastics, and silicone, expanding out past the traditional conception of the body and into a kind of immaterial futurespace.

SOPHIE’s worldbuilding comes from a long line of queer11 projects trying to rethink not just how sexuality and gender fit into social structures, but questioning social structures themselves, and who governs them. Therefore, this project must begin with the incredibly slippery task of trying to define queerness—both more generally and specifically through SOPHIE’s work. While in many parts of contemporary LGBTQ+ discourse, both in academic spaces and within the casual, social spaces LGBTQ+ people tend to gather in, queer is used as a synonym for gay, homosexual, or LGBTQ+, this research project aims to differentiate the term queer for a specific rhetoric purpose—going beyond an identity, 10

“SOPHIE – Whole NEW World/Pretend World,” Genius, accessed August 21, 2021, https://genius.com/Sophie-whole-new-world-pretend-world-lyrics.

11 For this research project, we will be dealing with the project of queerness, which can often accompany, but is not inherently an aspect of, transness and trans identities. While SOPHIE’s transness does relate to her queerness—as will become clear over the course of this research project—transness is in and of itself not inherently queer, as it can easily reproduce cisheterosexist gender binaries and structures.

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alignment, or sexual preference, queerness as defined in this paper represents a politics, a belief system, and a mode of thought. But queerness is as much a community building project as it is everything else, and no elements of queer theory or queer discourse were built alone. With that in mind we can look at three texts which work to define and theorize queerness—José Esteban Muñoz’s book Cruising Utopia, Michael Warner’s introduction to essay collection Fear of A Queer Planet, and Kara Keeling’s article “Queer OS”, and aim to synthesize these authors’ thoughts to think through queerness in its multifaceted, multipurpose existence and use them to see how the SOPHIE project is a queer undertaking.

With that in mind, we begin with José Esteban Muñoz and his 2009 book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Muñoz’s major thesis of Cruising Utopia is that queerness is an expression of future orientation—a mode of being which is utopic in nature, constantly looking up and forward at an ever accelerating horizon. He writes, “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality.

Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness's domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present.”12 Muñoz’s vision of queerness is about collectivity and imagination, imagining queerness as a kind of infinitude that is “imbued with potentiality”. We can think about Muñoz’s queer utopia as having a kind of ‘immateriality’ not dissimilar from SOPHIE’s ‘immaterial’ world in that it is always looking towards a horizon which we may never reach, untouchable and effectively immaterial.

Instead of queerness being a sexualized identity, Muñoz aligns it as a “mode of desiring”, specifically emphasizing the active quality of queerness, as something relational and action-oriented.

Muñoz wrote the book in response to a series of queer scholarship which had insisted on a kind of queer pessimism, most notably Lee Edelman’s 2004 book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, which argued for a kind of antisocial, antirelationism in which the queer is positioned against the figure of the child.13 Instead, Muñoz opens up the idea of queerness as a kind of hyperrelationism, a community-oriented, collective dreaming of “new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.”14 He writes his opening paragraph of his book in the first person plural, referring to the reader as ‘we’. In doing this, Muñoz emphasizes the collective nature of queerness, a mode that involves a ‘we’ and an ‘us’. Queerness is collaborative by nature, a project that involves the

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José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2019), 1.

13 For an excellent cross-reading of the two books, I recommend Drew Daniel’s 2010 review, “Trading Futures: Queer Theory's Anti-antirelational Turn” published in Criticism: Vol. 52: Iss. 2.

14 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia. 1.

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collective imagining of a group of people. In its most literal sense, the SOPHIE project is collaborative in that it involves the contributions and participation of a whole host of friends, artists, singers, performers, and the entire production and distribution machine of music. But the SOPHIE project also utilizes Muñoz’s concept of queerness as a collective dreaming of pleasure and being through the references she makes to her audience. In both “Immaterial” and “It’s Okay to Cry”, SOPHIE refers to ‘you’; the listener, the club-goer, the person who participates in the experience of the music and the project of the album. The use of ‘we’ and ‘you’ draws the participant in, connects SOPHIE to the rest of her audience in a direct way, making the songs about a kind of collective imagining and participation that feels spellbinding. The live concert also became a place of connection for SOPHIE; even when she was anonymous, SOPHIE was still putting on live performances, finding a way to participate with the audience and submerge herself in the collective experience of the music.

Muñoz also discusses the aesthetic element of queerness in his opening paragraph, honing in on the way queerness’s vision of the future is often expressed through queer aesthetics. He writes, “Often we can glimpse the worlds proposed and promised by queerness in the realm of the aesthetic. The aesthetic, especially the queer aesthetic, frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity.”15 The SOPHIE project is intrinsically tied to aesthetics, as the visual elements of her project become synthesized with the music through her music videos, stage performances, promotional shoots, and merchandising. Together, they imagine a kind of otherworldliness that Muñoz speaks of; for the cover of Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-insides, SOPHIE is pictured sitting on a black cube, her legs submerged into an oil-slick purple body of water which meets the purple-hued sky at the horizon line. She is wearing an iridescent dress of purple, green, and yellow cellophane, arms wrapped in skin-toned latex gloves with the word ‘NOTHINGNESS’ written across her inner forearm. One of her legs is covered in reptilian-esque sequins, the other remains bare, both reflected in the pool below her. The cover of the album presents far more questions than it does provide answers; yet they synthesize together to create this sense of in-between-ness—a world where one can be both part-organic and part-plastic, part-submerged and part-elevated, part-human and part-otherworldly. This is the ‘whole new world’—a queer world—that SOPHIE imagines, aesthetics helping to articulate the visions SOPHIE projects through her music.

Queerness, for ​Muñoz, is about the collective imagination of queer people in envisioning a future beyond the present. The future Muñoz desires for queer people is not one in which queer people are accepted into heterosexual society and given equal rights to straight people,16 but instead, Muñoz asks queer people to imagine a future entirely beyond the “quagmire of the present”, one in which we can 15

Muñoz, Cruising Utopia. 1.

Also important to note, Cruising Utopia was published while both the United States Congress' Defense of Marriage Act and the United States’ Department of Defense’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy were still in place, making them key issues in the LGBTQ+ rights movement at the time.

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“dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.”17 SOPHIE herself explicitly expresses her future oriented mode of thinking, saying in an interview with Glamcult, “I just don’t have so much fun looking back. I am way more excited about the future. […] The future seems more real.”18 Both SOPHIE and Muñoz express this future-oriented “mode of desiring” which places queerness as an expression of longing, manifesting, and dreaming of a deconstruction of the present and a reconstruction of a better, queerer future. As SOPHIE shows, queer aesthetics plays a vital part in that, visually mapping out the utopia queerness strives for.

We can also look to Michael Warner’s 1993 collection Fear of A Queer Planet to ground our queerness not just in an utopic, aspirational mode, but also considering the ways in which we can ground queerness in an everyday politics. Warner asserts a mode of queerness that, while not specifically utopically oriented, also seeks a radical questioning of social and political norms through the lens of queer identities. In the introduction of the book, Warner writes, “Being queer...means being able, more or less articulately, to challenge the common understanding of what gender difference means, or what the state is for, or what "health" entails, or what would define fairness, or what a good relation to the planet's environment would be,”19 articulating queerness is a politics as well as an orientation. Fear of A Queer Planet was seeking to reorient LGBTQ+ activism at its time of writing, a thread that Muñoz picks up on 16 years later. Warner was looking at the ways LGBTQ+ politics was using heterosexual cultural framework to undergird queer political movements, and questioning the purpose of queer theory itself, both inside and outside academia.

Warner’s writing highlights the importance of marrying queer theory with everyday experiences of queerness, which take place in a cisheterosexual society. Warner writes eloquently, “queer social theory must also reflect on the conditions that make the current practices of queer politics possible.”20 Warner also points out the shift many of the authors featured in the anthology have experienced personally—from identifying as ‘gay’ to identifying as ‘queer’—as a gesture towards the social-questioning nature of queerness. While ‘gay’ might be set up as an opposition to ‘straight’, ‘queer’, Warner writes, suggests “an aggressive impulse of generalization; it rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favor of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal.”21 Queerness goes beyond the scope of differentiating sexual orientations or practices, instead suggesting a kind of

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Muñoz, Cruising Utopia. 1.

Julius Pristauz, “SOPHIE,” Glamcult, 2018, https://www.glamcult.com/articles/sophie/.

19 Michael Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xiii.

20 Warner, xvi.

21 Warner, xxvi.

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world-building, moving to question both political and social structures. Warner puts it perfectly in saying that queerness “gets a critical edge by defining itself against the normal rather than the heterosexual.”22 SOPHIE’s work does exactly that—her work is queer not in its homosexuality or even its transness necessarily, but in definition against the normal. She herself has articulated this desire to move against the grain: in an interview with Michelle Lhooq for Teen Vogue in 2017 and later published in full on Lhooq’s Substack Rave New World, SOPHIE stated of her decision to de-anonymize: “I didn’t want to enter things out of a standard, a norm, a normal way of approaching things.”23 Her project questions not only the preconceived notions we have of music, materials, and meaning, but also of the pop music structure itself, of the world we inhabit, and of the relationships we have to others. Her project is queer in the way that it is constantly forcing the listener to re-orient their expectations, consistently unmooring them from their reality and allowing them to dream of whole new worlds.

When coupled with technology, this kind of worldmaking becomes imbued with a new kind of liberatory potential. Kara Keeling, in her 2014 article “Queer OS” for Cinema Journal, uses the logic of the Operating System (OS) to consider “the interfaces of new media”24 as well as hegemonic cultural phenomena and sexuality, and move to ‘queer’ them by deconstructing and reorienting the systems themselves. In using the concept of the OS, Keeling looks to the ‘software’ that makes up the structure of not just queerness and queer theory, but the general political and social context that surrounds queerness, and provides queerness a social order to work against in order to provide a logical ordering to the world.

This analysis becomes highly relevant in considering the SOPHIE project is predominantly expressed through technologies—both of music and of gender.

In her opening pages, Keeling lays out the goals of the project of Queer OS, beginning first with the ‘operating system’: “Queer OS would take historical, sociocultural, conceptual phenomena that currently shape our realities in deep and profound ways, such as race, gender, class, citizenship, and ability (to name those among the most active in the United States today), to be mutually constitutive with sexuality and with media and information technologies, thereby making it impossible to think any of them in isolation.”25 Queer OS, as a project for Keeling, is about recognizing that there is a inherent, intertwined, and inextricable interrelation between the “historical, sociocultural, conceptual” phenomena that constitutes society, culture, history, and politics, as well as technologies and sexuality, making them a ‘system’ that must be tackled as a singular unit—in this case, as a conceptual ‘operating system’. Keeling 22

Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet, xxvi.

Michelle Lhooq, “SOPHIE Was Here,” Rave New World (Rave New World, February 18, 2021), https://ravenewworld.substack.com/p/sophie-was-here.

24 Kara Keeling, “Queer OS,” Cinema Journal 53, no. 2 (2014): pp. 152-157, https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2014.0004. 152.

25 Keeling, 153.

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then defines ‘queer’ in her usage in the term ‘Queer OS’, writing, “[Queer OS] understands queer as naming an orientation toward various and shifting aspects of existing reality and the social norms they govern, such that it makes available pressing questions about, eccentric and/or unexpected relationships in, and possibly alternatives to those social norms.”26 SOPHIE’s work ties together queerness and technologies much in the same way Keeling does.

Expressions of queerness can be filtered through and also enhanced by the technologies of SOPHIE’s work. In her interviews, she expresses how her music functions to articulate complex feelings more successfully than words can: “I make my music to express everything I feel is necessary to communicate at a given time,” she said in a 2017 feature for Interview Magazine. “Through music, I can express myself with statements that are more nuanced and more contradictory than factual details.”27 One of the goals of the SOPHIE project, as she articulated in her interview with Lhooq, is utilizing electronic music to express feeling: “What I’m saying is emoting through technology can be equally emotional. Even if you’re not literally talking about crying or being sad or about love. As you know, electronic music can be also very emotional. I suppose I don’t feel that emotion is limited to ballad type song, and songs that I’ve done like “Lemonade,” I think you can be just as raw emotionally through something that seems superficial and light to other people, or purely an exercise in sound design and technology.

Communicating boldly, ultimately.”28 SOPHIE’s work is highly expressive, utilizing technologies to articulate feeling, gender, and connection and tie them together into a single project: She states in her Interview feature of the ways in which technologies become integral to her modes of expression: “I’m always trying to encapsulate how we, as emotional beings, interact with the world and the machines and technology around us — being able to emote through those things. They’re not antithetical or mutually exclusive.”29 Technologies function as a way to express the internal, as they both operate in planes of immateriality.

The project of Queer OS is an active one; not just to name and provide an intellectual structure to the current hegemonic sociocultural phenomena but also to actively queer it. Keeling writes of its goals, “Queer OS seeks to make queer into the logic of "an operating system of a larger order" [referencing Tara McPherson] that unsettles the common senses that secure those presently hegemonic social relations that can be characterized by domination, exploitation, oppression, and other violences...an aim of Queer OS vis-à-vis conceptualizations of commons is to provide a society-level operating system (and perhaps an operating system that can run on computer hardware) to facilitate and support imaginative, unexpected,

26

Keeling, “Queer OS”, 153.

Cedar Pasori, “Pop Wunderkind SOPHIE Synthesizes Human and Machine Voices,” Interview Magazine, October 19, 2017, https://www.interviewmagazine.com/music/sophie-its-okay-to-cry-interview.

28 Lhooq, “SOPHIE Was Here,” Rave New World.

29 Pasori, “Pop Wunderkind SOPHIE”, Interview Magazine.

27

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and ethical relations between and among living beings and the environment, even when they have little, and perhaps nothing, in common.”30 Keeling’s vision for a Queer OS ‘commons’ allows for new relations between people, animals, and the environment that is not exploitative in nature, instead allowing space for thoughtfulness and ethics to become a part of the world’s OS. While Muñoz’s queer world is utopic, and Warner’s is practical, Keeling’s is techonological: she sees the current hegemonic ‘operating system’ as founded on violence, and seeks to re-structure, re-orient, re-formulate, and queer the system to encourage growth, peace, ethics, and empathy collectively. She writes, “queer offers a way of making perceptible presently uncommon senses in the interest of producing a/new commons and/or of proliferating the senses of a commons already in the making.”31 She introduces the idea of a queer, technological ‘commons’, that would be “hospitable to, perhaps indeed crafted from, just and eccentric orientations within it.”32 Sylvia Federici, in her essay, “Feminism and the Politics of the Commons” published in The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State evaluates the concept of the commons through a feminist perspective, both asking what ‘the commons’ constitutes, and what (and who) is left out from its current conception. Both a feminist perspective on the commons and a queer, technological perspective are vital in, as Federici writes, evaluating “the conditions under which the principle of the common/s can become the foundation of an anti-capitalist program,”33 a project which is inherently both queer and feminst in nature. The examples Federici gives of the commons are urban gardens, common cooking pots, and women-led credit associations, providing small glimpses into the possibility of a world in which the commons are a feminist resource. Keeling’s concept of a queer, technological commons would be based in the queerness it prioritizes: “Such a commons,” Keeling writes, “would be hospitable to, perhaps indeed crafted from, just and eccentric orientations within it.”34 SOPHIE creates a kind of commons in her own works as well; fostering an environment of mutual collaboration and imagination to reach beyond herself and into her community. She stated in an interview of her desire to continue to collaborate, share artistic resources, and work with other musicians: “I get so much energy and I learn so much through collaborating with other people. Ultimately, I think the best music will always be created through collaborations — pooling together skills to create something bigger than any individual....When you’re working with other artists, it’s often a mix of your ideas with somebody else’s, which can be extremely fruitful.”35 Her remix albums, production credits on others’

30

Keeling, “Queer OS”. 154.

Keeling, 153.

32 Keeling, 153.

33 David Bollier, Silke Helfrich, and Sylvia Federici, “Feminism and the Politics of the Commons,” in The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State (Amherst, MA: Levellers Press, 2012), http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/feminism-and-politics-commons#footnote2_bk2esw1.

34 Kara Keeling, “Queer OS”. 153.

35 Pasori, “Pop Wunderkind SOPHIE”, Interview Magazine.

31

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songs, and collaborative projects all act as a kind of Queer OS worldbuilding, developing a queer, technological commons much in the way Keeling imagines.

Sitting with all of these interconnected conceptions of queerness, we can see how a queer orientation—not necessarily rooted in a sexual identity, but instead a political and philosophical alignment—can facilitate new visions of the world and our role within it. The Oxford English Dictionary asserts that the word queer’s etymology is murky, noting “origin uncertain”36 before attempting to trace a line through its varied historical English and German usage. The fact that the origin of the word queerness is unknown, or even dubious at best, already imparts a deviance onto the term that carries into its usage today. While one of the definitions the Oxford English Dictionary provides for queer is straightforwardly “Of a person: homosexual,”37 another, far more compelling definition is “​​strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric.

Also: of questionable character; suspicious, dubious.”38 Queerness in the usage provided by these theorists embodies a kind of deviance that homosexuality just does not; it embraces that ‘questionable character’ that permeates through one’s entire worldview, imbuing everything with the ‘dubious’ ‘peculiarity’ that the word implies. When Warner writes, “queer struggles aim not just at toleration or equal status but at challenging those institutions and accounts,”39 he is highlighting the worldmaking that Muñoz also articulates in Cruising Utopia: a queer world is not a world in which queer people recieve the same rights and privileges non-queer people do; a queer world is one where the institutions, the structure of the world is imbued with queerness, deviancy, ideailty and potentiality (to borrow a few words from Muñoz himself).40 Queerness involves worldbuilding, imagining a space past our current existence by questioning what we already have. Art has a vital role in this kind of imagining, as Muñoz has noted in his comments on queer aesthetics, and artists like SOPHIE provide a sonic visualization of the kinds of worlds queerness can create.

PRODUCT In putting together all of these notions of queerness for this research project, the assemblage is a helpful tool in considering how we can piece together these separate theoretical texts into a wider conception of queerness through which we can view the SOPHIE project, and also how we can think of the SOPHIE project as its own kind of assemblage. First theorized by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and 36

"queer, adj.1". OED Online. June 2021. Oxford University Press. https://www-oed-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/view/Entry/156236 (accessed August 04, 2021).

37 "queer, adj.1". OED Online.

38 "queer, adj.1". OED Online.

39 Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet. xiii.

40 Though out of the bounds of the current scope of this project, further reading would encapsulate even more considerations of queerness: Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet being another text through which to consider its definitions of queerness and its relationship to the SOPHIE project.

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Félix Guattari, an assemblage is, at its most basic, a concept of parts coming together to form a whole.

Utilized in Deleuze and Guattari’s book A Thousand Plateaus and again in What is Philosophy?, the assemblage is actually quite tricky to define using Deleuze and Guattari’s words themselves. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari use examples to explain the assemblage rather than attempting to define it—a book is an assemblage but so are its lines, literature itself is also an assemblage; through these examples, Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate that assemblages are not just objects or categories, but also cultures and phenomena as well. Part of the reason the assemblage is a concept that is difficult to grasp through the source of A Thousand Plateaus is that it is a kind of loosely formed ontological framework that is utilized but not ever fully defined by its authors; for this paper, we will be interpreting assemblage as it pertains to helping us conceptualize queerness, technologies, the body’s materiality, and SOPHIE as a project.

To understand the assemblage, it is helpful to begin with the meaning of the word itself.

‘Assemblage’ is the English translation of the French word ‘agencement’. As with all translations between languages, certain meanings are lost between the French and English: ‘agencement’ comes from the French verb ‘agencer’, meaning “to arrange, to lay out, to piece together,”41 whereas assemblage, from the verb ‘to assemble’ means “to bring together (things) into one place or mass, to collect.” 42 Going further, an assembly, in the English language, is a gathering, a collection, whereas an agencement “implies specific connections with the other concepts,”43 as John Phillips explains in his 2006 paper “Agencement/Assemblage”. He elaborates, “It is, in fact, the arrangement of these connections that gives the concepts their sense.”44 This sense of active arrangement, the meaning-making that comes with the piecing together of separate, different, elements, is a vital aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept that comes across in the utilization of the French agencement. Thomas Nail, in his 2017 paper “What is an Assemblage?”, likens Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblages to machines, in that each of their parts can be “added, subtracted, and recombined with one another ad infinitum without ever creating or destroying an organic unity.”45 An intrinsic part of the agencement/assemblage for Deleuze and Guattari is that each of the parts that constitutes its whole are self-contained and make meaning independently from the web of relations that would constitute its assemblage. It is when those parts come together as a whole and make a new set of meanings that is greater than the meanings of the parts itself that an assemblage is born.

41

Thomas Nail, “What Is an Assemblage?,” SubStance 46, no. 1 (2017): pp. 21-37, https://doi.org/10.3368/ss.46.1.21. 22.

42 “Assemble,” in Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press), accessed August 13, 2021.

43 John Phillips, “Agencement/Assemblage,” Theory, Culture & Society 23, no. 2-3 (2006): pp. 108-109, https://doi.org/10.1177/026327640602300219. 108.

44 Phillips, “Agencement/Assemblage,”, 108.

45 Nail, “What Is an Assemblage?”, 22.

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An assemblage produces meaning through the interrelation of its parts, effectively creating something more expansive than each of its parts individually. In this paper, we can view queerness as a kind of assemblage in the way it strings together a host of symbols and objects to come together to form something much less easily materialized—importantly extending the meaning-making of queerness beyond its material symbols and objects and into an immaterial concept that goes beyond the boundaries of the parts from which it is constituted. We can also view the SOPHIE project itself as a queer assemblage in the way it ties together varying objects—music videos, photo shoots, songs and albums, as well as SOPHIE herself both as a figure and as a producer—to make meaning that extends beyond each of its parts. The body also becomes an important object towards which to apply the assemblage in the context of this paper; when considering the body’s relationship to technologies, we can think of the technologized body as an assemblage in the ways technologies allow the body to extend beyond itself.

This kind of expansion can occur through technologies of gender, technologies of expression, and technologies of the body.

Two authors whose consideration of the body and embodied technologies as an assemblage can be helpful in understanding SOPHIE’s articulation of the body and materiality are Donna Haraway and Jasbir Puar. Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto”, originally published in 1985, utilizes the concept of the cyborg to complicate preconceived notions of discrete boundaries between humans and animals, nature and culture, and people and machines. Harway describes the figure of the cyborg as “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.”46 The cyborg, for Haraway, is both the literal object representing the marriage of people and embodied technologies as well as a metaphor for the contemporary subject who straddles more conceptual ontological boundaries. Haraway asserts that humankind as a whole are cyborgs in postmodernism, writing, “​​we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism—in short, cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation.”47 The cyborg is a feminist figure, a queer figure, and a liberatory figure in the ways it moves outside of discrete categories, complicating preconceived notions of personhood and seeking out transformational embodiment.

In imagining the figure of the cyborg, Harway is expressing a way in which the body becomes a kind of machinic assemblage, an idea Jasbir Puar picks up in her paper ‘I Would Rather be a Cyborg than a Goddess’, published in 2012 for philoSOPHIA. In her paper, she considers the ways in which we can 46

Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Manifestly Haraway, January 2016, pp. 3-90, https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816650477.003.0001. 5.

47 Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 5.

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view intersectionality in assemblage theory, using Harway’s concept of the cyborg to assert that “bodies are unstable entities that cannot be seamlessly disaggregated into identity formations.”48 This statement expresses a very queer concept, transcending boundaries and identities in favor of forming one’s own, a project SOPHIE picks up time and time again. Puar writes that Haraway’s cyborg functions as a Deleuzian and Guattarian assemblage, writing, “assemblages are interesting because they de-privilege the human body as a discrete organic thing. As Haraway notes, the body does not end at the skin. We leave traces of our DNA everywhere we go, we live with other bodies within us, microbes and bacteria, we are enmeshed in forces, affects, energies, we are composites of information. Assemblages do not privilege bodies as human, nor as residing within a human animal/nonhuman animal binary.”49 In addressing the cyborg as an assemblage, we can see the ways in which technologies function to disrupt the body as a discrete object both materially and conceptually. In the SOPHIE project, the technologies she uses to create her music, express her identity, and articulate her emotions become a kind of extension of the body through this same kind of assemblage that Puar theorizes.

We can also look at distinctly queer concepts of assemblage and see how they tie into the SOPHIE project. Turning to Reese Simpkins, whose 2017 paper “Temporal Flesh, Material Becomings”, published in Somatechnics, we can see how uses assemblage theory and applies it to both trans material and trans social processes. The paper draws from a wide variety of trans authorship (stylized as trans* in the paper to “push the boundaries of conceptualisations of embodiment”50 in trans scholarship, as well as highlight the open-endedness of the trans experience)51 in order to make an argument towards an “incorporeal, affective dimension of trans* embodiment”52 that invokes a multitemporal “becoming”53.

Thinking through this, we can also see the ways in which Simpkins’ theory of trans assemblage can be applied to the SOPHIE project as a queer and, in this case, trans assemblage.

Simpkins utilizes assemblage theory to think of the ways in which embodied systems can be organized. This becomes relevant when thinking of trans identities, where selfhood and their gender presentation are assembled both from the markings of gender and sex imposed upon the body, and from an internalized, incorporeal feeling of a gender or gender presentation. Simpkins writes: “Trans* assemblages...have two different dimensions: (1) the dimension of stable, organised coherence often 48

Jasbir K. Puar, “‘I Would Rather Be a Cyborg than a Goddess’: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory.,” PhiloSOPHIA 2, no. 1 (2012): pp. 49-66, https://doi.org/muse.jhu.edu/article/486621. 56.

49 Puar, “‘I Would Rather Be a Cyborg than a Goddess’”, 56.

50 Reese Simpkins, “Temporal Flesh, Material Becomings,” Somatechnics 7, no. 1 (February 2017): pp.

124-141, https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2017.0209. 124.

51 While Simpkins and others make compelling arguments towards the use of the hyphen or asterisk when writing trans(*/-), I choose not to utilize either of the additional punctuation marks when writing trans.

52 Simkins, “Temporal Flesh, Material Becomings”, 124.

53 Simkins, 124.

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marked by trans* identifications that are typically understood in terms of sex/gender, and (2) a dimension of incorporeally generated, affective becoming that cannot be expressed.”54 SOPHIE expresses her experience of transness as having similar internal and external articulations in a conversation with Justin Moran for PAPER in 2018. When asked, ‘What is transness to you?’ She replied, “For me, transness is taking control to bring your body more in line with your soul and spirit so the two aren't fighting against each other and struggling to survive.”55 Her comment here acknowledges the material aspect of transness, and draws a line between body and soul/spirit in expressing her gender. The body, as SOPHIE is articulating it, falls under the first category of trans assemblage that Simpkins articulates, the ‘stable, organized coherence’ that can be articulated through expressions of gender via clothing, surgeries, vocal pitch, etc., and the ‘soul and spirit’ is that ‘incorporeally generated, affective becoming’ Simpkins places in the second category. “Because the body is radically open,” Simpkins writes, “because it operates outside of consciousness, the parameters of discursive materialisation cannot, and, indeed, will never overcode the entirety of matter’s affective capacities. These capacities will continue to create new connections and new possibilities—this is where the dynamism of trans*ed matter comes into its own.”56 The ‘trans*ed matter’ that Simpkins highlights encompasses all of the aspects of transness that both SOPHIE and Simpkins articulate––both the ‘incorporeally generated, affective’ feeling of gender that trans people experience as a disjuncture from cis socializations, as well as the more ‘stable’ coherence that can be expressed through material gestures as well as common articulations of trans understanding.

One of Simkins’ most compelling points in this excerpt is suggesting that trans materiality, when placed in a “particular social-spatial location”, can move beyond the flesh to “enmesh seemingly discrete bodies”. Transness, as Simkins suggests, involves a process that moves beyond embodiment, affecting an extension beyond the self and perhaps, onto others. Going off of Eva Hayward’s conception of a “trans*-spider imbrication” with the metaphor of a spiderweb for certain aspects of trans identity formation, Simpkins writes, “just like a spider's embodiment incorporates its web, trans* embodiments affectively extend embodiment beyond the skin. These sensory webs affectively extend embodiment to incorporate a larger space than permitted by normative conceptualisations of ‘the body,’ which conceptualize the body as ending at the skin.”57 The SOPHIE project extends ‘beyond the skin’ in many ways—thinking back to Keeling’s notion of a ‘queer technological commons’ in her paper “Queer OS” we can think about SOPHIE’s collaborative process is a way of tying together disparate bodies/projects

54

Simpkins, “Temporal Flesh, Material Becomings,” 133-134.

Justin Moran, “SOPHIE's Whole New World,” PAPER, June 18, 2018, https://www.papermag.com/sophie-pride-2579165152.html?rebelltitem=42#rebelltitem42.

56 Simpkins, “Temporal Flesh, Material Becomings,” 135.

57 Simkins, 128.

55

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together through the queer process of worldbuilding, as well as her usage of electronic technologies as a medium to extend her expressive modes beyond the body itself.

IMMATERIAL One of the cornerstones of SOPHIE’s visualization of her queer world is through her investigation of the textures, objects, and feelings that make up both materiality and immaterial space. Throughout her work, she constantly questions the roles materials can play: in her branding and merchandising, in her sonic constructions, and in her physical body itself. Her merchandise, promotional material, and stage costumes cheekily utilize synthetic materials such as silicone, latex, and plastic to echo the ‘synthetic’ sound of her production; clanging beats, modulated vocals, and synthesized rhythms created from synths are all hallmarks of a SOPHIE track. Materials and materiality carry through SOPHIE’s work, acting as a thread which pulls together many parts of her project and identity while also pointing out the constructedness of materiality itself.

In her song “Immaterial”, SOPHIE reimagines what selfhood can be when one is separated from their materiality. Imagining a world in which you could “be anything you want,” without the boundaries of the material body weighing you down, she asks, “Without my legs or my hair / Without my genes or my blood / With no name and with no type of story / Where do I live? / Tell me, where do I exist?” 58 Through the song, she wonders how one can express themselves immaterially—imagining a place where the body becomes secondary to the internality of one’s feelings and internalized selfhood. She articulates a similar sentiment in her song “It’s Okay to Cry”, remarking, “I hope you don't take this the wrong way / But I think your inside is your best side,”59 shifting focus from the way one’s personhood is expressed and marked on the body and instead focusing on the internal feelings of identity as something felt and understood within the self. When describing the music video for the song, she states explicitly the goals of the video to express one’s internal landscape: “It’s about this idea of the richness and complexity of our inner and outer worlds — the emotional world and the external world, like the planets, the weather, and the universe. Just being overawed by how surreal, mysterious, and confusing the depth of both inner and outer worlds are. The video encapsulates the quiet, internal world flatly on top of or inside these universal, shifting landscapes, and contemplates how they are related. It’s somewhere in there, that feeling, that I wanted to communicate.”60

58

“SOPHIE – Immaterial,” Genius, accessed August 21, 2021, https://genius.com/Sophie-immaterial-lyrics.

59 “SOPHIE – It’s Okay to Cry,” Genius, accessed August 21, 2021, https://genius.com/Sophie-its-okay-to-cry-lyrics.

60 Pasori, “Pop Wunderkind SOPHIE”, Interview Magazine.

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SOPHIE’s immaterial world is utopic—imagining a future or other space where one’s identity is something wholly immaterial, ungrounded in the body, where the social and temporal dissipate so that one can exist without a name, history, home, or lineage. The answer to her question—where do I exist without materiality?—does not come out through her lyrics; instead, we could argue that it is expressed by the sonic form of the song itself. The pounding bass, echoing, lush harmonies, modulated vocals, and cascading rhythm all come together to express SOPHIE in all of her selfhood. SOPHIE’s work is grounded in her digital production, and so much of the expression of her identity: her gender, body, materiality, is expressed through the music itself.

Looking at SOPHIE’s work through the lens of materiality can help guide us through answering the questions of queerness and transness when engaged with technologies: What materials make up the body, the queer body, the technologized body? How does expression change in disembodied spaces and through technologies? We can think about assemblages of the self, and the ways in which the im/materiality of the self extends past the body through certain technologies. In SOPHIE’s work, these extensions of the body and its expressions of queerness can take many forms—through her music, lyrics, and through the mixing and production technology itself. First conceptualized through cybernetic and posthuman theory, much thought has been given to the ways in which the body can be extended, altered, and enhanced through technologies. In working through some of the sources of posthuman and cybernetic theory, we can utilize their core concepts to understand how the extensions of the body, as well as ideas around gender, expression, and materiality through technology are articulated in the SOPHIE project.

Nancy Katherine Hayles’ 2010 book How We Became Posthuman utilizes many of the concepts central to posthuman theory. In understanding that, we can use those concepts to apply to SOPHIE, marrying queer theory, assemblage theory, and cybernetic theory in understanding the materiality of the body in relation to queerness and technology. In the first chapter of the book, Hayles considers the ‘posthuman’ body as one in which information is privileged over matter, and bodies become yet another material through which information passes. Using cybernetic theory and history, she considers the human as an intelligent machine, reconceptualizing the self and the body through the processing of information and the networks through which bodily function occurs. She writes, “The posthuman subject is an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction.”61 Here, she thinks of the posthuman subject as experiencing a kind of infinitude, whose boundaries expand far beyond the material body. Not unlike Muñoz’s concept of a queer horizon, this infinitude can be understood as a kind of queer expression in the 61

Nancy Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2010). 3.

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context of figures like SOPHIE. This embodied expansion can occur via the use of prosthetics, machines, or simply through the recognition that humanist subjectivity, in the postmodern, does not end at the flesh, a concept also explored by Haraway in her article “A Cyborg Manifesto”. Hayles writes, “The posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born.”62 This also ties back to Puar’s notion of the cyborg assemblage, which does not privilege bodies as human, instead thinking of them as a part of a wider synthesis between what were considered discrete ontological categories. In thinking of the body as one of many prostheses, we can see how SOPHIE naturally uses technologies as a vehicle through which to express her feelings and her gender identity.

Queerness as a project often involves thinking of the body past its own preconceived limits, whether that be through gender identity, sexual expression, or social relationships. Experiencing the disjuncture between internalized gender and socially assigned ‘sex’ often puts queer and trans people in a position of feeling like their body does not fall in line with the feelings of their internal gender identity, so the notion of the body as an “original prosthesis” can easily be read through the lens of queerness.

Prosthetics and other technologies of gender become an intrinsic part of the queer and trans experience, often allowing queer people to feel more aligned with their bodies via the use of their prosthetics––whether that be hormone replacement therapy, dildos and packers, gender affirming surgeries, and more. The SOPHIE project is constantly reassessing how we can utilize technologies to expand and think past the body—both through gender affirming surgeries and technologies, and also through the music technologies that can express gender immaterially. When asked by Cedar Pasori in an interview for Interview Magazine, “Do you have a relationship to the machines you make music with in the same way?”63 Sophie replied, “Yes. They’re electronic instruments being used with the body.”64 Her specification of using the music technologies with the body emphasizes how the two work in sync, becoming a kind of expressive prosthesis through which gender, emotions, materiality, and connection can be articulated.

The materiality and makeup of the body itself is also explored through Hayles’ cybernetics: she says the posthuman subject is “a material informational entity,” grounding the body in its materiality through its possession and processing of information. Later in the chapter, Hayles cites William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, in which the narrator refers to the posthuman subject as “data made flesh.”65 Both Gibson and Hayles look to the posthuman body as one in which data and flesh are entangled to both

62

Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 5.

Pasori, “Pop Wunderkind SOPHIE”, Interview Magazine.

64 Pasori.

65 William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York, NY: Ace Books, 1984), 16. In Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 5.

63

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highlight the inherent materiality of the body as something grounded in flesh, and at the same time, question whether there can be other materials that make up the concept of the body, such as data. Used by Hayles and Gibson, data can be understood as the information and metrics that are attached to ourselves, whether placed upon us or self-generated. Common examples of this can be medical data, such as the information taken during a patient intake at a hospital, or user data, such as our interests, location, and click rate taken from websites we visit and the internet-enabled devices we use. In a posthuman world, theorists like Hayles, Gibson, and others view data as an integral part of the self, and a way for the self to extend beyond the flesh. This becomes apparent in the kind of music SOPHIE makes, which is grounded in electronic music data. The primary tools she uses for production translate physical inputs through synthesizers, such as the Elektron Monomachine,66 to make electronic sounds that come together to constitute a SOPHIE song. In this way, the movements of the body such as pressing buttons and twisting knobs are translated into data, which can then be altered through computer production software such as Ableton. SOPHIE’s production technique was especially interconnected with this process in that she does not sample or use beat kits, instead constructing all of her sounds from scratch, allowing her production process to go directly from her body into data without any intermediary facilitation.67 We can also consider further how this kind of datafication can be a queer process. In an article for Somatechnics titled “Getting Our Hands Dirty: Reflections on Data”, authors Lotta-Lili Fiedel, Lisa Malich, and Sofia Varino consider the production of data through a queer and feminist lens, considering the ways it intertwines with matter to make social meaning. They write, “Although data are symbolic, mediated, and abstract, they often stand in a closer, less arbitrary connection to the ‘real world’ or to the technosomatic materiality of our embodied everyday lives.”68 Considering the ways in which our bodies are encoded through informational data, we can see how data and embodied matter are intertwined and inseparable, and how that dictates not only what we consider realms like politics, economics, and medicine, but also culture, gender, and lived experience. This comes across often in SOPHIE’s work; in interviews and through her music she is constantly exploring the ways in which technologies can be emotionally expressive.

In songs like “It’s Okay to Cry”, SOPHIE turns electronic music into an expressive medium. In her interview with Michelle Lhooq, she discusses the way the sound design of the song becomes a mode of expression for her feelings—particularly the inhale/exhale that marks the beginning of the track. She

66

Yu-Cheng Lin, “SOPHIE: A Beginner's Guide to A Hyperpop Mystery,” Red Bull (Red Bull, February 22, 2017), https://www.redbull.com/us-en/sophie-a-beginners-guide.

67 Lin, “SOPHIE”, Red Bull.

68 Lotta-Lili Fiedel, Lisa Malich, and Sofia Varino, “Getting Our Hands Dirty: Reflections on Data,” Somatechnics 9, no. 2-3 (November 2019): pp. 159-169, https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2019.0277.

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said, “​​I was thinking about inhaling and exhaling and Doppler motion effects. That sound is the combination of those two sound ideas. An inhale and exhale has a certain shape and frequencies to it, that we can simulate the effect of. And Doppler also has a particular shape of its pitch envelope that happens when something is accelerating towards you. Ultimately, it’s like, thinking about emotion through time and there being motion in releasing feelings. Ultimately there is the texture of the song. It’s about time passing, and an emotional journey is how you could synthesize those things.”69 Through the sound design of her music, she is able to express feelings in the synthetic beats. In a song like “It’s Okay to Cry”, which is an articulation of her trans identity, the production becomes tied up in her queer feelings, becoming a way in which the data of the music is queer, and her queerness becomes datafied.

In “Getting Our Hands Dirty”, the authors write that “​​data, matter and gender relate to, and shape, one another.”70 This data can also be a part of the encoding of our identities as it becomes aligned with others or is marked as atypical; deviating from a large set of ‘normalized’ data can flag us as a kind of queer, such as when trans people go through an airport security screening in the United States. In these cases, passengers go through Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) in which the body’s contours are scanned and translated into image data.71 Often, transgender bodies are flagged as containing ‘anomalies’ that deviate from a ‘generic’ gendered body, 72 causing passengers to be subjected to additional searches, invasive questioning, and often harassment and discrimination by airport staff.73 Though not a physical extension of the body, a person’s data can have real-world consequences on the flesh, becoming an integral part of one’s identity and lived experience in our datafied world. In many ways, SOPHIE’s twisting of the genre of pop becomes a kind of data anomaly as she subverts the tropes of pop music to push it past its limits. In the Pitchfork review for Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, author Sasha Geffen states the use of disruption of the SOPHIE project perfectly: “By complicating the naturalness of the human voice and corrupting established pop structures, SOPHIE also complicates the supposed naturalness of gender, which has always been inextricable from music.”74 Another author who seeks to conceptualize queer materiality and its relationship to data and technologies––specifically focusing on the the im/materiality of the digitized, queer, body, is Legacy 69

Michelle Lhooq, “WHAT SOPHIE SAID,” Rave New World (Rave New World, February 4, 2021), https://ravenewworld.substack.com/p/what-sophie-said.

70 Fiedel, Malich, and Varino, “Getting Our Hands Dirty”.

71 “Know Your Rights | Airport Security,” National Center for Transgender Equality, accessed August 19, 2021, https://transequality.org/know-your-rights/airport-security.

72 “Know Your Rights”, National Center for Transgender Equality.

73 JD Shadel, “#Travelingwhiletrans: The Trauma of Returning to 'Normal',” The Washington Post (WP Company, June 16, 2021), https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2021/06/16/trans-travel-tsa-lgbtq/.

74 Sasha Geffen, “SOPHIE: Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides,” Pitchfork (Pitchfork, June 15, 2018), https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sophie-oil-of-every-pearls-un-insides/.

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Russell, whose chapbook-style manifesto titled Glitch Feminism was published in 2020. Grounding her research in artists and writers who work to complicate the body and synthesizing the work of various cybernetic, feminist, and queer theorists, she uses the concept of the glitch to represent a disruption between the body, gender, and identity; an ‘error’ which she argues opens up space for freedom of movement, identification, and play. Going off of the work of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as theorists like Haraway, Butler, and Puar, she argues that the body is a kind of identificatory assemblage, made up of various markers of gender, race, and sexuality that come together to be expressed through the material of the flesh. In her writing, she argues that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a body,”75 elaborating on Simone de Beauvoir’s famous quote, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,”76 which argues for the social constructedness of womanhood. In expanding that quote to cover the body, Russell is commenting on the ways in which the body has been socially constructed—and how the glitch can highlight the deviations that the body can make. SOPHIE expresses similar thoughts through her music; in “Immaterial”, she asks, “Without my legs or my hair / Without my genes or my blood / With no name and with no type of story / Where do I live? / Tell me, where do I exist?” 77 Through the lyrics, SOPHIE is questioning what parts of the body are intrinsic to identity—and existence. This ties back to some of her earlier statements about how she views her trans identity as the marriage of the soul/spirit and the body, and viewing that statement through Russell’s theory of the body as a socially constructed assemblage, we can see how the SOPHIE project expresses, as Geffen says, the supposed naturalness of one’s gender.

In Glitch Feminism, the body is a key point of inquiry: Russell questions the rules which govern the body, asking, “Who defines the material of the body? Who gives it value — and why?”78 A glitched body, she argues, is one which fails to perform coherent gender, sexuality, and race, belonging to someone who questions their own materiality and the systems which govern it. Highlighting the ‘ill-defined’ ways in which we consider the body, she writes, “We use ‘body’ to give material form to an idea that has no form, an assemblage that is abstract...This glitch aims to make abstract again that which has been forced into an uncomfortable and ill-defined material: the body.”79 The way she theorizes the body’s relationship to form and idea ties back into SOPHIE’s expressions in “Immaterial”, as both she and Russell consider the abstraction of the body and its materiality and the ways in which we can embody or disembody a certain kind of immaterial. This kind of embodied abstraction can be a way of expressing queerness and

75

Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism (London: Verso, 2020). 12.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York, NY: Vintage Classic, 2015). 330. Quoted in Russell, Glitch Feminism, 12.

77 “SOPHIE – Immaterial,” Genius, accessed August 21, 2021, https://genius.com/Sophie-immaterial-lyrics.

78 Russell, Glitch Feminism, 9.

79 Russell, 17.

76

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gender nonconformity, ‘glitching’ cisgender, heterosexual society and considering the ways one’s body and identity relate to technologies.

FACESHOPPING While we can think of ways in which technologies can extend the body both conceptually and physically, we can also think of ways in which technologies intervene, or ‘hack’ the body, toying with the materiality of the body and the line between ‘organic’ and ‘artificial’. The music video for “Faceshopping”, the third song on Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, begins with a flickering black screen.

Suddenly, lyrics flash across the screen: “MY FACE IS THE FRONT OF SHOP” 80. A computer rendered, close-up image of SOPHIE appears after the word ‘FACE’, flashing for a brief moment before moving on. The character looks like SOPHIE, has the same hair and eye colors, and general facial structure of the performer, but it is not a perfect rendering; certain features have been exaggerated to make her look plastic—fuller lips and higher cheekbones, with wide set eyes and hypersmooth skin. As the music video continues, different images flash across the screen—unmarked makeup and perfume bottles, dewy skin, macro images of flowers, flashes of blue lightning across a dark sky. Intercut between the lyrics and images is that same computer rendering of SOPHIE, though it begins to move. Adopting a latex plasticity, the SOPHIE head begins to melt, twist, bubble, and bounce, taking on the characteristics of a rubber balloon. All the while, the lyrics chant: “My face is the front of shop / My face is the real shop front / My shop is the face I front / I'm real when I shop my face”.81 “Faceshopping” is one of SOPHIE’s most esoteric songs. It takes on a completely different tone from the rest of the songs on Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides; its production is harsh, disruptive, and jarring, and its vocals are pushed to the depths of pitch and tone, almost becoming another element of its clanging, screeching rhythm. The song’s first verse lists off seemingly disparate objects and oxymoronic phrases: “Artificial bloom / Hydroponic skin / Chemical release / Synthesise the real / Plastic surgery / Social dialect / Positive results / Documents of life”82. Reading the lyrics through the context of SOPHIE’s transition, the literal process of ‘faceshopping’, we can see how these seemingly unrelated lyrics fit together to highlight the disparate parts of transition that combine the ‘real’ and the ‘artificial’ to make up SOPHIE, both the project and the producer.

Through both the lyrics and the imagery of “Faceshopping”, SOPHIE highlights the ways in which the queer body becomes a site of intervention and change, ‘synthesizing the real’ as both artificial

80

SOPHIE — Faceshopping (Official Video), YouTube (YouTube, 2018), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es9-P1SOeHU. 81 “SOPHIE – Faceshopping,” Genius, accessed August 23, 2021, https://genius.com/Sophie-faceshopping-lyrics.

82 “SOPHIE – Faceshopping,” Genius.

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and organic matter combine to achieve the desired results of gender transition. These interventions utilize various technologies of gender, as SOPHIE notes some of the artifacts involved via her lyrics: synthetic hormones, plastic surgery, vocal training, and altering government documents. In many ways, the song itself expresses the marriage of ‘artificial’ and ‘organic’ through its production, altering human vocals (most likely SOPHIE’s herself) into new shapes, forms, and expressions. The production style becomes another way for SOPHIE to consider and express her gender, marrying the body and technology through her expressions of transness. Within the production, the body becomes technologized, and technology becomes embodied, meeting at the site of her gender transition.

We can read the body’s relationship to gendered technologies through the lens of authors like Paul B. Preciado. In his book Testo Junkie, he considers the body as the site of intersecting technologies of gender. Preciado evaluates both the body’s relationship to technology and the body as a technology through the lens of his own experience transitioning as well as the larger interplays of embodied technologies of gender. In the book, which alternates between first person narrative and extended theoretical text, Preciado declares the postwar era “the pharmacopornographic era”, outlining an extensive history of the ways in which the state (both looking towards Europe and the US) have attempted to assert control over bodies of its citizens through a ‘pharmacopornographic regime’ via technologies of gender.

He argues that this regime uses sexuality as the main mode of subjugation, particularly through manipulation of hormones using state-regulated drugs and through legal control over sex workers and the sex industry. Preciado himself is detailing his experimentation with control over his body and hormones throughout the book, self-administering synthesized testosterone as embarks on his gender transition. In the book, Preciado looks at certain technologies of gender to see the ways in which they alter the body, but also play into larger systems of sociopolitical control and deviance. Many of the lyrics SOPHIE uses in ‘Faceshopping’ describe embodied technologies of gender as defined by Preciado; the lyrics “scalpel, lipstick, gel”83 in the second verse name three items used in gender transition, the last of which (testosterone transdermal gel) Preciado actually uses himself throughout the book.

Preciado views the postwar, gendered body as one which is intrinsically tied with technology. He writes, “The pharmacopornographic body is not passive living matter but a techno-organic interface, a technoliving system segmented and territorialized by different (textual, data-processing, biochemical) political technologies.”84 In this quote, he speaks to the body as a system that has been ‘territorialized’ by different technologies. His use of the word “interface” to describe the body is particularly compelling.

Using the Oxford English Dictionary definition of interface, “A means or place of interaction between two systems, organizations, etc.; a meeting-point or common ground between two parties, systems, or 83

“SOPHIE – Faceshopping,” Genius.

Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (New York, NY: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2017). 114.

84

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disciplines; also, interaction, liaison, dialogue.”85 We can see Preciado articulating the body as a site of various technologies intersecting, something articulated in SOPHIE’s production and lyrics throughout her project and especially in “Faceshopping”. In the SOPHIE project as well as in Preciado’s theory, technologies and the body work together to express feeling, gender, and identity. SOPHIE’s title “Faceshopping” can also be interpreted in a more literal sense—as a term for facial feminization surgery, or FFS for short. FFS is actually a series of plastic surgeries utilized by trans women to achieve a more feminine face, and can include forehead contouring, browlift, trachea shaving, rhinoplasty, and liposuction.86 Faceshopping is a play on the term ‘photoshopping’, the process of altering photos using raster graphics editor Adobe Photoshop, and also a reference to the way one ‘shops’ for their face when undergoing FFS—by paying money to undergo plastic surgery. The trans body becomes a site of technologization and becomes itself technologized, the literal process of ‘faceshopping’ as one undergoes gender affirming medical transitional processes.

Preciado views this process as liberatory and subversive; it is expressed most seriously through his experience of undergoing hormone replacement therapy, which he details at length in various vignettes throughout the book. Self-administering topical testosterone that he has acquired via his interpersonal networks rather than through a state-licensed medical system, Preciado philosophizes about his experience of transition as going against the pharmacopornographic regime, in that it subverts the state’s goal of keeping gendered bodies aligned with certain expressions and biologies. Going back to her quote from her interview with Justin Moran for PAPER, she expressed similar views about the liberatory potential of trans identities: “​​On this earth, it's that you can get closer to how you feel your true essence is without the societal pressures of having to fulfill certain traditional roles based on gender. It means you're not a mother or a father — you're an individual who's looking at the world and feeling the world. And it's somehow more human and universal, I feel.”87 Through both her music and her interviews, SOPHIE explores the liberatory potential of the trans identity, when one is no longer bound to the same kind of social apparatuses that come with heterosexual culture. Embracing the technologization of the body, we can see how these kind of interventions can be liberatory both on a personal level and on a wider social level; many interviews with SOPHIE articulate her impact on the trans and electronic communities as she expresses the ways in which technologies of both electronic music and gender can be liberatory, and marrying the two mediums through her production.

85

“Interface,” in Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press), accessed August 19, 2021, https://www-oed-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/view/Entry/97747?rskey=QtLane&result=1&isAdvanced=f alse#eid.

86 Beauty | ContraPoints, YouTube (YouTube, 2019), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9mspMJTNEY. 87 Justin Moran, “SOPHIE's Whole New World,” PAPER, June 18, 2018, https://www.papermag.com/sophie-pride-2579165152.html?rebelltitem=42#rebelltitem42.

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We can also look at the way SOPHIE articulates transition as a synthesis between ‘synthetic’ and ‘organic’; a way of breaking the boundaries of preconceived notions of gender and of marrying her physical embodiment with her digital modes of production. Her work expresses the ways in which materials become a part of her mode of expression, both via the manipulation of materials in her production sound and also in the way synthetic materials are incorporated into the body during processes of medical transition. In her 2014 song “Hard”, the lyrics list off a variety of objects and their materials over the crashing, crunching production of the song: “Latex gloves, smack so hard / PVC, I get so hard / Platform shoes kick so hard / Ponytail, yank so hard / Leatherette, party so hard / PVC, I get so hard / Platform shoes kick so hard.”88 When married with the incredibly harsh sound of the track, the lyrics synthesize the materiality of the song, ‘hardening’ it together until the disparate parts are taken as one.

SOPHIE has also played with the materiality of her own body; In the PAPER cover shoot for June 2018 as well as in her music video for “It’s Okay to Cry”, she prosthetically enhanced her cheekbones, echoing a common procedure for gender affirming surgery in which silicone implants are inserted into the face to give a more feminine appearance. She also incorporates a variety of materials into her stage performances and costumes; for her show at Elsewhere in Brooklyn in 2018, she wore a head-to-toe latex head and wrapped herself in gauzy red fabric. She has expressed her interest in exploring materials throughout her work, stating “That’s something consistent in the music, and there’s a parallel between the clothing I’ve been drawn to, particularly latex, rubber and PVC. Perhaps that’s related to why I’ve been more drawn to synthesized tones and textures of music. That’s pretty consistent throughout since I started performing as SOPHIE: the main materials I would wear were rubbers and latex.”89 This goes back to one of SOPHIE’s mantras throughout her project: ‘synthesizing the real’ through both electronic production and gender transition.

As SOPHIE explores the way the body can cross the boundaries between ‘organic’ and ‘synthetic’ through her use of materials on stage as well as through the technologies of music and gender, theorists have explored what is at stake when these boundaries are complicated. Authors like Haraway have asked, “Why should our bodies end at the skin?”90 and through assemblage theory, theorists like Puar and Magrit Shildrick have applied different social positions towards that question. In Shildrick’s essay, ““Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?”: Embodiment, Boundaries, and Somatechnics”, for Somatechnics in 2013, Shildrick looks at the crossing of boundaries between bodies and technologies through the lens of disability studies. Both queer bodies and disabled bodies utilize prosthetics as a way to extend the body past itself—often with the object becoming part of one’s own identity. Shildrick writes, 88

“SOPHIE – Hard” Genius, accessed August 23, 2021, https://genius.com/7189278 Michelle Lhooq, “SOPHIE: In the Flesh,” Rave New World (Rave New World, March 1, 2021), https://ravenewworld.substack.com/p/sophie-in-the-flesh.

90 Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 61.

89

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“As with Haraway's cyborg, the prosthetic body can make no stable distinctions between the organic and inorganic, between the natural and artificial, between therapeutic and enhancement, or ultimately between self and other.”91 Through adopting prostheses—whether of ability or gender—the notion of the body is once again complicated, questioning where we can draw the line between ‘synthetic’ and ‘organic’.

We can also think of music technologies such as a vocal synthesizer functioning as a kind of gender and expressive prosthetic by feminizing or masculinizing the voice through tonal pitch and altering its expressive range and inflection. This is a technique SOPHIE uses frequently in her music, often complicating the idea of who is even singing—during SOPHIE’s early career, she often featured other female vocalists in her place, only utilizing her own voice later in her full-length album. Utilizing various kinds of technological prosthetics blurs the line between self and technologies, Shildrick argues, writing, “it is clear that to rely on a prosthesis is not a matter of a self using an exterior and impartial technology, but of incorporation, of becoming embodied as hybrid.”92 Interestingly, Shildrick quotes Jacques Derrida’s 1995 book Points…: Interviews, 1974-1994 in which he discusses the interplay of technology and the body, and what it does to the self, writing, “‘technology has not simply added itself, from the outside or after the fact, as a foreign body…this foreign or dangerous supplement is “originarily” at work and in place in the supposedly ideal interiority of the “body and soul”. It is indeed at the heart of the heart’.”93 We can think back to SOPHIE’s expression of her own transness as a synthesis of the spirit/soul and the body; reading through Derrida and Shildrick we can see how technologies become a part of the internality of a person, affirming gender not just through physical enhancements but also through internal transformation—at, as Derrida says, ‘the heart of the heart’.

Just Like We Never Said Goodbye The more time I’ve spent reviewing SOPHIE’s legacy—not just her music, but also her interviews, press photos, features, and live performances—the more I understand how the SOPHIE project was the synthesis of years of thoughtfulness, hard work, collaboration, and visionary talent. As SOPHIE’s discography unfolded from 2013 to 2021, her work built upon itself, creating an-ever expanding, utopian world of im/materiality and queerness, full of expression and playfulness. As a pop producer and arguably a pop figure in her own right, a player in a machine which often twists and degrades artists desires into something marketable and digestible, I found myself shocked by how consistent her tone, message, and ideas stayed across various iterations of her project. SOPHIE herself

91

Margrit Shildrick, “Re-Imagining Embodiment: Prostheses, Supplements and Boundaries,” Somatechnics 3, no. 2 (2013): pp. 270-286, https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2013.0098. 276.

92 Shildrick, “Re-Imagining Embodiment”, 273.

93 Jacques Derrida, Points... : Interviews, 1974-1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995). 244. In Shildrick, “Re-Imagining Embodiment”, 277.

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was incredibly elusive; in the time she was actively producing work her interviews were extremely limited, and in most of them she steered away from any discussions on her personal life, instead allowing her music to express her thoughts, feelings, and politics.

We can learn from SOPHIE how to be, just as Muñoz desired, positively future-oriented. Often we think of technologies as dispassionate, cold, or unfeeling, but SOPHIE’s ongoing goal of utilizing electronic music as a medium to express not only emotions and relationships, but also identity and desires, shows how technologies can actually facilitate a new way of expressing oneself; using an immaterial medium to share immaterial feelings. This project can be hugely empowering for queer and trans people, because queer and trans embodiment is so materially difficult. Pursuing HRT, getting gender affirming surgery, buying clothing, prosthetics, and makeup, that feels aligned with your identity, and being seen and acknowledged by heterosexual society as the gender you wish to embody is expensive as well as exhausting. As SOPHIE expressed across her work, transness opens a door to imagining a world in which preconceived gender roles are not forced upon you, making a space for freedom for expression and selfhood. For SOPHIE, transness is the synthesis of the spirit and the body—reconciling the expressions that can be held in trans embodiment while also transcending the physical limits of the body to express internal, disembodied, and immaterial feelings.

One of SOPHIE’s songs which continues to stand out to me is “Just Like We Never Said Goodbye,” released as a part of her Product collection in 2015. The song expresses feelings of nostalgia; of seeing someone significant to your past and remembering the way they used to make you feel. Its lyrics feel purposefully vague; there are no significant details to ground the song in a specific person or experience. It feels like it is speaking to a kind of universal feeling of loss and longing, and is one of SOPHIE’s most expressive songs in the extremely human depths of feeling it reaches. Through the hums of synthesizers and drum machines, she sings in the outro, “Still got that glint in your eye / Like you did the very first time / Oh, it's like we never said goodbye / And it makes me feel, makes me feel, like everything that I could ever need / And it makes me feel, and it makes me feel, like I don't ever wanna say goodbye.”94 With the loss of SOPHIE earlier this year, the song takes on its own special meaning; the more research I conducted on her the less I wanted to say goodbye, sitting with the immeasurable loss of an incredibly special artist and visionary. But another SOPHIE mantra which I continue to repeat to myself provides the guiding words with which I can move into the future with vulnerability, strength, and grace: it’s okay to cry.

94

“SOPHIE – Just Like We Never Said Goodbye,” Genius, accessed September 14, 2021, https://genius.com/Sophie-just-like-we-never-said-goodbye-lyrics.

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Puar, Jasbir K. “‘I Would Rather Be a Cyborg than a Goddess’: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory.” philoSOPHIA 2, no. 1 (2012): 49–66. https://doi.org/muse.jhu.edu/article/486621. "queer, adj.1". OED Online. June 2021. Oxford University Press. https://www-oed-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/view/Entry/156236 (accessed August 04, 2021).

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Simpkins, Reese. “Temporal Flesh, Material Becomings.” Somatechnics 7, no. 1 (February 2017): 124–41. https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2017.0209.

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“SOPHIE – Faceshopping.” Genius. Accessed August 23, 2021. https://genius.com/Sophie-faceshopping-lyrics.

“SOPHIE – Just Like We Never Said Goodbye.” Genius. Accessed September 14, 2021. https://genius.com/Sophie-just-like-we-never-said-goodbye-lyrics.

“SOPHIE – Whole NEW World/Pretend World.” Genius. Accessed August 21, 2021. https://genius.com/Sophie-whole-new-world-pretend-world-lyrics.

SOPHIE — It's Okay To Cry (Official Video). YouTube. YouTube, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_S0qCeA-pc.

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Warner, Michael. Introduction. In Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, edited by Michael Warner, vii-xxxi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

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Discography QT, SOPHIE, and A.G. Cook, “Hey QT,” Single, XL Recordings, 2014.

SOPHIE, “Faceshopping,” Track 3 on Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides, Transgressive, Future Classic, and MSMSMSM, 2017.

SOPHIE, “Hard,” Track 4 on Product, Numbers, 2015.

SOPHIE, “Immaterial,” Track 8 on Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides, Transgressive, Future Classic, and MSMSMSM, 2017.

SOPHIE, “It’s Okay to Cry,” Track 1 on Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides, Transgressive, Future Classic, and MSMSMSM, 2017.

SOPHIE, “Just Like We Never Said Goodbye” Track 8 on Product, Numbers, 2015.

SOPHIE, “Lemonade,” Track 3 on Product, Numbers, 2015.

SOPHIE, “Whole New World/Pretend World” Track 9 on Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides, Transgressive, Future Classic, and MSMSMSM, 2017.

Images SOPHIE, Still from “It's Okay To Cry (Official Video).” YouTube, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_S0qCeA-pc.

SOPHIE, Still from “Faceshopping (Official Video).” YouTube, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es9-P1SOeHU. SOPHIE, Promotional image from compilation album ‘PRODUCT’, Numbers, 2015. http://nmbrs.net/releases/sophie-product-special-editions-nmbrs48/ Rodgers, Adam. Album art for ‘PRODUCT’ singles, Numbers, 2013-2015. https://nmbrs.bandcamp.com/ Cingi, Burak, and Redferns, SOPHIE performing at Heaven, London, UK on March 13, 2018, Getty Images, 2018. https://pitchfork.com/news/sophie-has-died/ SOPHIE, cover art for Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides Non-Stop Remix Album, MSMSMSM, Future Classic and Transgressive, 2019.

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