Embodied Voices
Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture

Explores cultural manifestations of female vocality in the light of theories of subjectivity, the body, and sexual difference.

Leslie C. Dunn (Edited by), Nancy A. Jones (Edited by)

9780521585835, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 5 December 1996

276 pages, 5 b/w illus. 3 music examples
23 x 15.4 x 1.6 cm, 0.368 kg

'... this book makes a bold step in addressing, not least, the future of musicological discourse; namely, whether and how to (dis)locate the boundaries between the musical and the 'extra-musical'. Thus, it should excite anyone interested in the fundamental issue of the meaning of music in our culture.' Brio

As a material link between body and culture, self and other, the voice has been endlessly fascinating to artists and critics. Yet it is the voices of women that have inspired the greatest fascination, as well as the deepest ambivalence, because the female voice signifies sexual otherness as well as sexual and cultural power. Embodied Voices explores cultural manifestations of female vocality in the light of current theories of subjectivity, the body and sexual difference. The fourteen essays collected here examine a wide spectrum of discourses, including myth, literature, music, film, psychoanalysis, and critical theory. Though diverse in their critical approaches, the essays are united in their attempt to articulate the compelling yet problematic intersections of gender, voice, and embodiment as they have shaped the textual representation of women and women's self-expression in performance.

Introduction
Part I. Vocality, Textuality, and the Silencing of the Female Voice: 1. The Gorgon and the nightingale: the voice of female lament and Pindar's Twelfth Pythian Ode
2. Music and the maternal voice in Purgatorio XIX
3. Ophelia's songs in Hamlet: music, madness and the feminine
4. Wordsworth and Romantic voice: the poet's song and the prostitute's cry
Part II. Anxieties of Audition: 5. 'No women are indeed': the boy actor as vocal seductress in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century drama
6. Deriding the voice of Jeanette MacDonald: notes on psychoanalysis and the American film musical
7. Adorno and the Sirens: tele-phono-graphic bodies
Part III. Women Artists: Vocality and Cultural Authority: 8. The diva doesn't die: George Eliot's Armgart
9. Rewriting Ophelia: fluidity, madness, and the voice in Louise Colet's La Servante
10. Staring the camera down: direct address and women's voices
11. The voice of lament: female vocality and performative efficacy in the Finnish-Karelian itkuvirsi
Part IV. Maternal Voices: 12. The lyrical dimensions of spirituality: music, voice, and language in the novels of Toni Morrison
13. Red hot mamas: Bessie Smith, Sophie Tucker, and the ethnic maternal voice in American popular song
14. Maternalism and the material girl Nancy J. Vickers.

Subject Areas: Music: styles & genres [AVG]