The ambition of this research is to gain a deeper sense of voice as something that is continually being experienced—something that is alive with the capacity to change form and function—rather than being recorded. In this thesis I propose the idea of becoming-voices, agitating alternative conceptualisations not bounded to subjectivity or narrative content. Prompted by my own lived experience of anorexia, I was curious to inquire into the expression of voice to understand how this configuration changes depending on the different relational, dialogical, and liminal spaces they flow through and between. I draw from the experimental and playful nature of Post Qualitative Inquiry (PQI) to think, create, map, and research new and different ways that make voice immanent. Unfolding from the ambivalent spaces that I am situated in as a person with personal history of anorexia, and professionally as a psychotherapist, I attend to the tensions and contradictions present in conventional qualitative research and fracture binary notions of voice over-represented in the mental wellness scholarship. PQI has the capacity to deal with the ambivalence and incompleteness of voice, resisting privileged methods of “reading” or “listening” that interpret content to fix voice as states-of-being. In my view, voices are experienced as complex, multisensory experiences that are sometimes—and sometimes not—heard, seen, felt, smelled, touched, and sensed depending on the materiality and physicality of the space. They are elusive shapeshifters, and it is this metamorphic quality that potentiates lived experiencing as transformative.
Uninterested in determining meaning related to the binaries of anorexic and recovered narratives, my aim was to understand what made the experience of voices so intense that their effects could be uniquely re-experienced and re-encountered in varying degrees shaped by the particular milieu from which they emerged. The intense corporeality of voices associated with anorexia made for an ideal entry point. Inspired by the Deleuze-Guattarian concepts of the rhizome and events, I argue voice demands a more radical attuning that considers the forces, energies, and vibrations that keep it alive and always in a state of becoming. The resulting thesis is an assemblage of experiential cartographies; artistic and narrative experimentations that irrupted by deconstructing and then reconstructing interview data favoured by voice-centred research methods. Oriented by an immanent ontology, each chapter plays with different ways of attuning to stay with the entanglement of voice and the fullness of data. Combining art-making-as-inquiry processes to create unique cartographies, the complex interplay of sensate and affective connections that produce becoming-voices could be accessed. This made tangible the expressions and experiences of voice that were influenced by the human and non-human, and animate and inanimate elements that also fold into the present moment. The intention is to create a contemporary, non-linear text which invites you into enter a liminal space where the boundaries are blurred, deliberately evoking an encounter that speaks of the uncertain, fractured, and distortedness of becoming-voice.
The significance of this thesis is two-fold. First, each map extends beyond the realm of research folding in my other alive “experiencings” that move me constantly into and between different territories—spaces where I am continually dispersed and arrayed—transforming what I have known into something else. Second, it is unafraid in showing the chaotic messiness of the inter-related events that compose a family assemblage, enunciating the virtuality of these lived and wonder-full events using immanent processes of attuning. Unconventionally, I finish by drawing from another irruption—my work with infants to propose the new concept of “interphonics” as the condition for becoming-voice in families with the hope it can be extended on. My research further supports the becoming-ness of PQI concerned with the relational potentialities that rouse inquiries into what voice does and what makes it possible.