“Your voice says a lot about you”: engendering masculinities in incel communities through voice

In September 2023, the X account for the Vers and Lukas podcast posted a link to the “Voicecel Test.” Using a term from the incel community, a portmanteau of “voice” and “incel,” this tool promises to help users discover how their voices are perceived—whether they project the “squeaky unaesthetic high voice” of an incel or the attractive tones of a “deep voice Chad.” The post went viral, garnering 2 million views in two days. This paper takes the Voicecel Test as an entry point to examine the voicecel phenomenon in incel culture to show how, in our audio-driven digital landscape, the voice gains saliency in making the gendered self legible. Through an interface analysis of the Voicecel Test site, as well as a feminist critical discourse analysis of digital incel spaces, we examine how participants in these communities (re)construct gendered voices, and how these constructions demonstrate Mickey Vallee’s conceptualization of the voice as an “imaginary organ” through which subjects perform gender. We argue that discourses surrounding the voicecel are critical to their engendering of normative masculinities, and for the way they bring these supposedly fringe frameworks closer to the mainstream.