“Locating Her Kind,” a sonic essay in the form of a 15-minute HD video with sound, is a gender critique exploring female voices as discarded and silenced.
This essay contains an array of female voices (including my own) reading poetry and speaking first person narratives, intercut with readings from news articles and other media, in an attempt to demonstrate how female voices and agency are trivialized, made insignificant, or discarded like rubbish.
My ongoing research on the female voice reflects and refracts female subjectivities. This research strategy of collecting, recording, editing, and playing back to others to get feedback is a collective feminist practice.
This sonic essay theorizes field recordings in a new way, not as a process of conquest or acquisition on the field site, but as a less masculinized paradigm that is not result-oriented. By challenging structural hegemonies through sonic resistance, the voices speak back, push back.
“Locating Her Kind” experiments with deconstructing the “authoritative male voice” and reconstituting a materiality of sonic presence from female perspectives.
This sonic essay considers Film and Media Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and multimodality.
Sonic Sources
Celebrity Spill (2021). “Britney Spears Blasts Her Father in Court (Full Speech).”
MsMojo (2020). “Top 20 Celebs Who Shut Down Sexist Interview Questions.”
Orr, Peter (2012). “A 1962 Sylvia Plath Interview with Peter Orr.” Modern American Poetry.
Roberts, Robin (2021). “Anita Hill on Her New Book Believing: Our 30- Year Journey to End Gender Violence.” Good Morning America, 27 Sept.
Rogers, Tim (2021). “Paxton Smith Speech at Lake Highlands Graduation.”
Sexton, Anne (1959). “Music Swims Back to Me.” Harper’s Magazine.
Sexton, Anne (1960). “Her Kind.” Poetry Foundation.
Sexton, Anne (1962). “The Sun.” Harper’s Magazine.