An Effortless Voice: Queer Vocality and Transgender Identity in Kim Fu’s For Today I Am a Boy

This chapter offers some reflections on the social and cultural relevance of vocal identity in the embodiment of queer subjectivities through a reading of Kim Fu’s 2014 novel For Today I Am a Boy. The coming-of-age story of Peter Huang, a young Canadian of Chinese descent who undertakes the slow and painful journey from boy to woman, is mapped out through a web of intertextual references that this contribution aims at unravelling. The starting point is the title of the novel itself, a direct reference to the eponymous song by Antony Hegarty. Choosing the song as a privileged “point of hearing” for Peter’s story allows this contribution to trace the emergence of different vocal positionings to emerge, in the novel as well as in wider elaborations of queer positionalities.