From the Wooden O to Tim Blake Nelson’s O: The Boy Actor’s Voice and the Performance of Gender and Race

This chapter begins with a question: How might the vocal quality of the boy-actor playing Desdemona have inflected the audience’s perception of Othello’s racial otherness? I delve into the so-called vibrato controversy to examine how the presence or absence of vibrato could have shaped the audience’s understanding of Desdemona’s moral character and gender appearance and thus have influenced the way Othello’s blackness was perceived. I then draw analogies with the film O, the teen remake of Othello set in a predominantly white boarding school with the Othello figure as a black basketball prodigy. I focus especially on how the quality of Julia Stiles’s voice as Desi (Desdemona) figuratively colors the audience’s perception of inner-city blackness. Examining the various and conflicting associations in the film with that voice (the “Ave Maria” from Verdi’s Otello; rap music; teen rebellion; sexual vulnerability; whiteness), I conclude that the voice of Desi contains within it so many of the hopes, desires, fears, and fantasies regarding race relations in twenty-first-century America.