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Listening to Gender: A Response to Judith Halberstam

Listening to Gender: A Response to Judith Halberstam Listening to Gender: A Response to Judith Halberstam Judith A. Peraino he aural dimensions of gender and sexuality--voice and music--have haunted the margins of theory but have seldom factored as centrally as the visual. "Scopophilia"--the privileging of sight--has become a mainstay in theory, tied to physical morphology, namely, the presence or absence of the penis. This primary visual division of bodies into the "haves" and the "have-nots," around which gender roles have been formed, has relegated the aural component of gender as something akin to a secondary sex characteristic. Judith Butler has made some tantalizing references to sound and music. In Bodies That Matter she writes that "the process of signification is always material; signs work by appearing (visibly, aurally)."1 "Aurally" seems thrown 1. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 68, emphasis in the original. in here as a gesture toward spoken language, but what she has most in mind ("signification is always material; signs work by appearing") is clearly visual display. Then there is Butler's clever invocation of Aretha Franklin and her recording of "Natural Woman" in the famous essay "Imitation and Gender Insubordination": Well, consider the way in which heterosexuality naturalizes itself through http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture University of Nebraska Press

Listening to Gender: A Response to Judith Halberstam

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Publisher
University of Nebraska Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 by the International Alliance for Women in Music.
ISSN
1553-0612
Publisher site
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Abstract

Listening to Gender: A Response to Judith Halberstam Judith A. Peraino he aural dimensions of gender and sexuality--voice and music--have haunted the margins of theory but have seldom factored as centrally as the visual. "Scopophilia"--the privileging of sight--has become a mainstay in theory, tied to physical morphology, namely, the presence or absence of the penis. This primary visual division of bodies into the "haves" and the "have-nots," around which gender roles have been formed, has relegated the aural component of gender as something akin to a secondary sex characteristic. Judith Butler has made some tantalizing references to sound and music. In Bodies That Matter she writes that "the process of signification is always material; signs work by appearing (visibly, aurally)."1 "Aurally" seems thrown 1. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 68, emphasis in the original. in here as a gesture toward spoken language, but what she has most in mind ("signification is always material; signs work by appearing") is clearly visual display. Then there is Butler's clever invocation of Aretha Franklin and her recording of "Natural Woman" in the famous essay "Imitation and Gender Insubordination": Well, consider the way in which heterosexuality naturalizes itself through

Journal

Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture – University of Nebraska Press

Published: Oct 30, 2007

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