Abstract This project studies the failing singing voice as a minoritised sonic language through the development of an autotheoretical novel centred on a singer who attempts, and fails, to create a pornopera. Situated at the intersection of vocal performance, exposure, and excess, the project uses autotheoretical fiction as an artistic research method to examine how the singing voice collapses under conditions of hyper-visibility and desire.

The novel follows a singer whose voice, once aligned with control and erotic capital, begins to falter. What fails is not only a vocal instrument, but a network of expectations regarding femininity, sexuality, artistic labour, and excellence. The rehearsal process of the opera becomes a laboratory in which questions of consent, representation, and spectatorship surface, even as the work itself appears increasingly unlikely to reach the stage.

By staging failure at the heart of this project, the research foregrounds vocal breakdown as a form of situated knowledge. The failing voice emerges not as lack, but as a voice that cannot sustain heightened exposure, and thus reveals its limits within artistic forms structured around intensity and control. In this sense, the voice becomes a lens onto broader tensions of audibility and desire in a culture that is simultaneously hyper-sexualised and hyper-vigilant.

Drawing on feminist theory, cultural studies, and artistic research in and through voice, the novel operates as a research apparatus rather than a narrative illustration. Writing becomes a way of thinking with and through vocal failure, allowing the research to remain with exhaustion, shame, pleasure, and interruption without resolving them into stable concepts or outcomes. Presented as a work-in-progress, the project reflects on autotheoretical fiction as a fragile research language; one that makes space for breakdown, opacity, and embodied knowledge, and that resists both academic abstraction and performative virtuosity.