“Adopting subjectivity as a defining value, therefore, is instructive. However, the multidimensionality of the instruction also reveals the need for a shift in paradigms, a need that I find especially evident with regard to the notion of ‘voice,’ as a central manifestation of subjectivity.”
—Jacqueline Jones Royster
Jacqueline Jones Royster sets out three aims in her article, “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own.” The first of these is to present three “scenes” as “personal testimony as ‘subject'”; the second to “demonstrate that our critical approaches to voice, again as a central manifestation of subjectivity, are currently skewed toward voice as a spoken or written phenomenon”; and the third a “call for action in cross-boundary exchange is to refine theory and practice so that they include voicing as a phenomenon that is constructed and expressed visually and orally, and as a phenomenon that has import also in being a thing heard, perceived, and reconstructed” (30).