Sounding Out!

“I Am Thinking Of Your Voice”: Gender, Audio Compression, and a Sonic Cyberfeminist Theory of Oppression

I developed the text I recite in this post as the theoretical framework for an article I’m working on about audio compression. As I was working on the article, I wondered about the role of gender and race in the research on audio compression. Specifically, I was reminded of the central role Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner” played into research that led to the mp3. Karl-Heinz Brandenburg used the song to test the compression method he was developing for mp3s because it sounded “warm.” Sure, the track is very intimate and Vega’s voice is soft and vulnerable. But to what extent is its “warmth” the effect of a man’s perception of Vega addressing him as either/both an intimate partner or caregiver? Is its so-called warmth dependent upon the extent to which Vega’s voice performs idealized white hetero femininity, a role from which patriarchy definitely expects warmth (intimacy, care work) but can’t be bothered to hear anything beyond or other than that from (white) women?

“Suzanne Vega 13. Inselleuchten 02” by Wikimedia Commons user Olaf Tausch under GFDL license (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY 3.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)

In other words, I’m wondering about what ways our compression practices are shaped by white supremacist, patriarchal listening ears. Before anyone even runs an audio signal through a compressor, how do patriarchal gender systems already themselves act as a kind of epistemological and sensory compression that separates out essential from inessential signal, such that we let women’s warm, caring voices through while also demanding they discipline themselves into compressing their anger and rage away?

The literature does address the role of sexism and ableism in the shaping of audio technologies, but this critique is most commonly framed in conventionally liberal terms that understand oppression as a matter of researcher bias that excludes and censors minority voices. For example, the literature addresses the way “cultural differences like gender, age, race, class, nationality, and language” are overlooked by researchers (Jonathan Sterne), offers cursory nods to the biases and preferences of white cis men scientists (Ryan Maguire), or claims that “the principles of efficiency and universality central to the history of signal processing also worked to censure atypical voices and minor modes of communication” (Mara Mills). Though such analyses are absolutely necessary components of sonic cyberfeminist practice, they are not sufficient.

“Untitled” by Flickr user Charlotte Cooper, CC-BY-2.0

We also need to consider the ways frequencies get parsed into the structural positions that masculinity and femininity occupy in Western patriarchal gender systems. Patriarchy doesn’t just influence researchers, their preferences, their choices, and their judgments. How is the break between essential and inessential signal mapped onto the gendered break between what Beauvoir calls “Absolute” and “Other,” masculine and feminine? Patriarchy is not just a relation among people; it is also a relation among sounds. I don’t think this is inconsistent with the positions I cited earlier in this paragraph; rather, I am pursuing the concerns that motivate those positions a bit more emphatically. And this is perhaps because our objects of analysis are slightly different: I’m a political philosopher interested in political structures that shape epistemologies and ontologies—such as the patriarchal gender system organized by masculine absolute/feminine other—whereas most of the scholars I cited earlier have a more STS- and media-studies-approach that is interested in material culture.

As a way to address these questions, I made a short critical karaoke-style sound piece where I read a shortened version of the text below over the original version of “Tom’s Diner” from Vega’s album Solitude Standing (which, for what it’s worth, I first owned on cassette, not digitally). I recorded my voice reciting a condensed version of the framework I develop for a sonic cyberfeminist theory of oppression over a copy of the original, a cappella version of “Tom’s Diner.” If I were in philosopher mode, I would theorize the full implications of this aesthetic choice, but I’m offering this as a sound art piece, the material and sensory dimensions of which provide y’all the opportunity to think through those implications yourselves.

[Text from audio]

Perceptual coding and perceptual technics create breaks in the audio spectrum in the same way that neoliberalism and biopolitics create breaks in the spectrum of humanity. Perceptual coding refers to “those forms of audio coding that use a mathematical model of human hearing to actively remove sound in the audible part of the spectrum under the assumption that it will not be heard” (loc 547). Neoliberalism and biopolitics use a mathematical model of human life to actively remove people from eligibility for moral and political personhood on the assumption that they will not be missed. They each use the same basic set of techniques: a normalized model of hearing, the market, or life defines the parameters of what should be included and what should be disposed of, in order to maximize the accumulation of private property/personhood.

These parameters are not objective but grounded in what Jennifer Lynne Stoever calls a “listening ear”: “a socially constructed ideological system producing but also regulating cultural ideas about sound” (13). Perceptual coding uses white supremacist, capitalist presumptions about the limits of humanity to mark a break in what counts as sound and what counts as noise…such as presumptions about feminine voices like Suzanne Vega’s.

Perceptual coding subjects audio frequencies to the same techniques of government and management that neoliberalism and biopolitics subject people to. For this reason, it can serve as a specifically sonic cyberfeminist theory of oppression.

It shows us not just how oppression works under neoliberalism and biopolitics, but also its motivations and effects. The point is to increase the efficient accumulation of personhood as property by white supremacist capitalist patriarchal institutions. Privilege is the receipt of social investment and the ability to build on it by access to circulation. Oppression is the denial of this investment and access to circulation. For example, mass incarceration takes people of color out of circulation and subjects them to carceral logics…because this is the way such populations are most profitable for neoliberal and biopolitical white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

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Featured image: “Solo show: Order and Progress at Fabio Paris Art Gallery (Brescia, 15 January 2011)” by Flickr user Roͬͬ͠͠͡͠͠͠͠͠͠͠͠sͬͬ͠͠͠͠͠͠͠͠͠aͬͬ͠͠͠͠͠͠͠ Menkman, CC BY-NC 2.0

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Robin James is Associate Professor of Philosophy at UNC Charlotte. She is author of two books: Resilience & Melancholy: pop music, feminism, and neoliberalism, published by Zer0 books last year, and The Conjectural Body: gender, race and the philosophy of music was published by Lexington Books in 2010. Her work on feminism, race, contemporary continental philosophy, pop music, and sound studies has appeared in The New Inquiry, Hypatia, differences, Contemporary Aesthetics, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies. She is also a digital sound artist and musician. She blogs at its-her-factory.com and is a regular contributor to Cyborgology.

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tape reelREWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Tape Hiss, Compression, and the Stubborn Materiality of Sonic Diaspora–Christopher Chien

On Whiteness and Sound Studies–Gustavus Stadler

Unlearning Black Sound in Black Artistry: Examining the Quiet in Solange’s A Seat At the Table–Kimberly Williams

INC

Out Now: Silicon Plateau Volume 2

Silicon Plateau is an art project and publishing series that explores the intersection of technology, culture and society in the Indian city of Bangalore. Each volume of the series is a themed repository for research, artworks, essays and interviews that observe the ways technology permeates the urban environment and the lives of its inhabitants. The project is an attempt at creating collaborative research into art and technology, beginning by inviting an interdisciplinary group of contributors (from artists, designers and writers, to researchers, anthropologists and entrepreneurs) to participate in the making of each volume.

Silicon Plateau Volume 2 explores the ecosystem of mobile apps and their on-demand services. The book investigates how apps and their infrastructure are impacting our relationship with the urban environment; the way we relate and communicate with each other; and the way labour is changing. It also explores our trust in these technologies, and their supposed capacity to organise things for us and make them straightforward—while, in exchange, we relentlessly feed global corporations with our GPS data and online behaviours.

The sixteen book contributors responded to a main question: what does it mean to be an app user today — as a worker, a client, or simply an observer?

The result is a collection of stories about contemporary life in Bangalore; of conversations and deliberations on how we behave, what we sense, and what we might think about when we use the services that are offered to us on demand, through just a tap on our mobile screens.

Download

.EPub

.PDF

Contributors

Sunil Abraham and Aasavri Rai, Yogesh Barve, Deepa Bhasthi, Carla Duffett, Furqan Jawed, Vir Kashyap, Saudha Kasim, Qusai Kathawala, Clay Kelton, Tara Kelton, Mathangi Krishnamurthy, Sruthi Krishnan, Vandana Menon, Lucy Pawlak, Nicole Rigillo, Yashas Shetty, Mariam Suhail.

Editors

Marialaura Ghidini and Tara Kelton.

Publisher
Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, in collaboration with The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, 2018. ISBN: 978-94-92302-29-8.

Book and Cover design

Furqan Jawed and Tara Kelton.

Copyediting

Aditya Pandya.

Supported by

Jitu Pasricha, Bangalore; Aarti Sonawala, Singapore; The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.

More information

siliconplateau.info.

Janneke Adema

A new article – science fiction template

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Section 5

A new article

Amelia Walker
Abstract

This is the new abstract. This is the new abstract. This is the new abstract. This is the new abstract. This is the new abstract. This is the new abstract. This is the new abstract. This is the new abstract. This is the new abstract. This is the new abstract. This is the new abstract. This is the new abstract. This is the new abstract. This is the new abstract. This is the new abstract. This is the new abstract.

Keywords

Learn; new; things

FULL TEXT

This is the new article text

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License.

ISSN: 2202-2546

© Copyright 2015 La Trobe University. All rights reserved.

CRICOS Provider Code: VIC 00115M, NSW 02218K

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Sounding Out!

The Top Ten Sounding Out! Posts of 2018!

For your end-of-the year reading pleasure, here are the Top Ten Posts of 2018 (according to views as of 12/4/18). Visit this brilliance today–and often!–and know more fire is coming in 2019!

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10). Mr. and Mrs. Talking Machine: The Euphonia, the Phonograph, and the Gendering of Nineteenth Century Mechanical Speech

J. Martin Vest

In the early 1870s a talking machine, contrived by the aptly-named Joseph Faber appeared before audiences in the United States.  Dubbed the “talking head” by its inventor, it did not merely record the spoken word and then reproduce it, but actually synthesized speech mechanically. It featured a fantastically complex pneumatic system in which air was pushed by a bellows through a replica of the human speech apparatus, which included a mouth cavity, tongue, palate, jaw and cheeks. To control the machine’s articulation, all of these components were hooked up to a keyboard with seventeen keys— sixteen for various phonemes and one to control the Euphonia’s artificial glottis. Interestingly, the machine’s handler had taken one more step in readying it for the stage, affixing to its front a mannequin. Its audiences in the 1870s found themselves in front of a machine disguised to look like a white European woman.[. . .Click here to read more!]

 

9).Mixtapes v. Playlists: Medium, Message, Materiality

Mike Glennon

The term mixtape most commonly refers to homemade cassette compilations of music created by individuals for their own listening pleasure or that of friends and loved ones. The practice which rose to widespread prominence in the 1980s often has deeply personal connotations and is frequently associated with attempts to woo a prospective partner (romantic or otherwise). As Dean Wareham, of the band Galaxie 500 states, in Thurston Moore’s Mix-Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture, “it takes time and effort to put a mix tape together. The time spent implies an emotional connection with the recipient. It might be a desire to go to bed, or to share ideas. The message of the tape might be: I love you. I think about you all the time. Listen to how I feel about you” (28).

Alongside this ‘private’ history of the mixtape there exists a more public manifestation of the form where artists, most prominently within hip-hop, have utilised the mixtape format to the extent that it becomes a genre, akin to but distinct from the LP. As Andrew “Fig” Figueroa has previously noted here in SO!, the mixtape has remained a constant component of Hip Hop culture, frequently constituting, “a rapper’s first attempt to show the world their skills and who they are, more often than not, performing original lyrics over sampled/borrowed instrumentals that complement their style and vision.” From the early mixtapes of DJs such as Grandmaster Flash in the late ’70s and early ’80s, to those of DJ Screw in the ’90s and contemporary artists such as Kendrick Lamar, the hip-hop mixtape has morphed across media, from cassette to CDR to digital, but has remained a platform via which the sound and message of artists are recorded, copied, distributed and disseminated independent of the networks and mechanics of the music and entertainment industries. In this context mixtapes offer, as Paul Hegarty states in his essay, The Hallucinatory Life of Tapes (2007), “a way around the culture industry, a re-appropriation of the means of production.” [. . .Click here for more!]

 

8).My Music and My Message is Powerful: It Shouldn’t be Florence Price or “Nothing”

Samantha Ege

Flashback to the second day of the recent Gender Diversity in Music Making Conference in Melbourne, Australia (6-8 July 2018). In a few hours, I will perform the first movement of the Sonata in E minor for piano by Florence Price(1887–1953). In the lead-up, I wonder whether Price’s music has ever been performed in Australia before, and feel honored to bring her voice to new audiences. I am immersed in the loop of my pre-performance mantra:

My music and message is powerful, my music and message is powerful.

Repeating this phrase helps me to center my purpose on amplifying the voice of a practitioner who, despite being the first African-American woman composer to achieve national and international success, faced discrimination throughout her life, and even posthumously in the recognition of her legacy.

In Price’s time, there were those in positions of privilege and power who listened to her music and gave her a platform. One such instance was Frederick Stock of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and his 1933 premier of her Symphony in E minor. But there were times when her musical scores were met with silence. For example, when she wrote to Serge Koussevitzky of the Boston Symphony Orchestra requesting that he hear her music, the letter remained unanswered. There was a notable intermittency in how Price was heard, which continues today. It seems most natural for mainstream platforms to amplify her voice in months dedicated to women and Black history; any other time of the year appears to require more justification. And so, as I am repeating this mantra—my music and message is powerful—I am attempting to de-centre my anxieties, and center my service to amplifying Price’s voice through an assured performance . [. . .Click here for more!]

 

7). “Most pleasant to the ear”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Itinerant Intellectual Soundscapes

Phillip Sinitiere

Upon completing a Ph.D. in history at Harvard in 1895, and thereafter working as a professor, author, and activist for the duration of his career until his death in 1963, Du Bois spent several months each year on lecture trips across the United States. As biographers and Du Bois scholars such as Nahum Chandler, David Levering Lewis, and Shawn Leigh Alexander document, international excursions to Japan in the 1930s included public speeches. Du Bois also lectured in China during a global tour he took in the late 1950s.

In his biographical writings, Lewis describes the “clipped tones” of Du Bois’s voice and the “clipped diction” in which he communicated, references to the accent acquired from his New England upbringing in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Reporter Cedric Belfrage, editor of the National Guardian for which Du Bois wrote between the 1940s and 1960s, listened to the black scholar speak at numerous Guardian fundraisers. “On each occasion he said just what needed saying, without equivocation and with extraordinary eloquence,” Belfrage described. “The timbre of his public-address voice was as thrilling in its way as that of Robeson’s singing voice. He wrote and spoke like an Old Testament prophet.” George B. Murphy heard Du Bois speak when he was a high school student and later as a reporter in the 1950s; he recalled the “crisp, precise English of [Du Bois’s] finely modulated voice.” [. . .Click here for more]

 

6.) Beyond the Grave: The “Dies Irae” in Video Game Music

Karen Cook

For those familiar with modern media, there are a number of short musical phrases that immediately trigger a particular emotional response. Think, for example, of the two-note theme that denotes the shark in Jaws, and see if you become just a little more tense or nervous. So too with the stabbing shriek of the violins from Psycho, or even the whirling four-note theme from The Twilight Zone. In each of these cases, the musical theme is short, memorable, and unalterably linked to one specific feeling: fear.

The first few notes of the “Dies Irae” chant, perhaps as recognizable as any of the other themes I mentioned already, are often used to provoke that same emotion. [. . .Click here for more!]

 

5). Look Away and Listen: The Audiovisual Litany in Philosophy

Robin James

According to sound studies scholar Jonathan Sterne in The Audible Past, many philosophers practice an “audiovisual litany,” which is a conceptual gesture that favorably opposes sound and sonic phenomena to a supposedly occularcentric status quo. He states, “the audiovisual litany…idealizes hearing (and, by extension, speech) as manifesting a kind of pure interiority. It alternately denigrates and elevates vision: as a fallen sense, vision takes us out of the world. But it also bathes us in the clear light of reason” (15).  In other words, Western culture is occularcentric, but the gaze is bad, so luckily sound and listening fix all that’s bad about it. It can seem like the audiovisual litany is everywhere these days: from Adriana Cavarero’s politics of vocal resonance, to Karen Barad’s diffraction, to, well, a ton of Deleuze-inspired scholarship from thinkers as diverse as Elizabeth Grosz and Steve Goodman, philosophers use some variation on the idea of acoustic resonance (as in, oscillatory patterns of variable pressure that interact via phase relationships) to mark their departure from European philosophy’s traditional models of abstraction, which are visual and verbal, and to overcome the skeptical melancholy that results from them. The field of philosophy seems to argue that we need to replace traditional models of philosophical abstraction, which are usually based on words or images, with sound-based models, but this argument reproduces hegemonic ideas about sight and sound. [. . .Click here to read more!]

 

4). becoming a sound artist: analytic and creative perspectives

Rajna Swaminathan

Recently, in a Harvard graduate seminar with visiting composer-scholar George Lewis, the eminent professor asked me pointedly if I considered myself a “sound artist.” Finding myself put on the spot in a room mostly populated with white male colleagues who were New Music composers, I paused and wondered whether I had the right to identify that way. Despite having exploded many conventions through my precarious membership in New York’s improvised/creative music scene, and through my shift from identifying as a “mrudangam artist” to calling myself an “improviser,” and even, begrudgingly, a “composer” — somehow “sound artist” seemed a bit far-fetched. As I sat in the seminar, buckling under the pressure of how my colleagues probably defined sound art, Prof. Lewis gently urged me to ask: How would it change things if I did call myself a sound artist? Rather than imposing the limitations of sound art as a genre, he was inviting me to reframe my existing aesthetic intentions, assumptions, and practices by focusing on sound.

Sound art and its offshoots have their own unspoken codes and politics of membership, which is partly what Prof. Lewis was trying to expose in that teaching moment. However, for now I’ll leave aside these pragmatic obstacles — while remaining keenly aware that the question of who gets to be a sound artist is not too distant from the question of who gets to be an artist, and what counts as art. For my own analytic and creative curiosity, I would like to strip sound art down to its fundamentals: an offering of resonance or vibration, in the context of a community that might find something familiar, of aesthetic value, or socially cohesive, in the gestures and sonorities presented. [. . .Click here for more!]

 

3). “How Many Latinos are in this Motherfucking House?”: DJ Irene, Sonic Interpellations of Dissent and Queer Latinidad in ’90s Los Angeles

Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr.

How Many Latinos are in this Motherfucking House? –DJ Irene

At the Arena Nightclub in Hollywood, California, the sounds of DJ Irene could be heard on any given Friday in the 1990s. Arena, a 4000-foot former ice factory, was a haven for club kids, ravers, rebels, kids from LA exurbs, youth of color, and drag queens throughout the 1990s and 2000s. The now-defunct nightclub was one of my hang outs when I was coming of age. Like other Latinx youth who came into their own at Arena, I remember fondly the fashion, the music, the drama, and the freedom. It was a home away from home. Many of us were underage, and this was one of the only clubs that would let us in.

Arena was a cacophony of sounds that were part of the multi-sensorial experience of going to the club. There would be deep house or hip-hop music blasting from the cars in the parking lot, and then, once inside: the stomping of feet, the sirens, the whistles, the Arena clap—when dancers would clap fast and in unison—and of course the remixes and the shout outs and laughter of DJ Irene, particularly her trademark call and response: “How Many Motherfucking Latinos are in this Motherfucking House?,”  immortalized now on CDs and You-Tube videos.

Irene M. Gutierrez, famously known as DJ Irene, is one of the most successful queer Latina DJs and she was a staple at Arena. Growing up in Montebello, a city in the southeast region of LA county, Irene overcame a difficult childhood, homelessness, and addiction to break through a male-dominated industry and become an award-winning, internationally-known DJ. A single mother who started her career at Circus and then Arena, Irene was named as one of the “twenty greatest gay DJs of all time” by THUMP in 2014, along with Chicago house music godfather, Frankie Knuckles. Since her Arena days, DJ Irene has performed all over the world and has returned to school and received a master’s degree. In addition to continuing to DJ festivals and clubs, she is currently a music instructor at various colleges in Los Angeles. Speaking to her relevance, Nightclub&Bar music industry website reports, “her DJ and life dramas played out publicly on the dance floor and through her performing. This only made people love her more and helped her to see how she could give back by leading a positive life through music.”  [. . .Click here for more!]

 

2). Canonization and the Color of Sound Studies

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay

Last December, a renowned sound scholar unexpectedly trolled one of my Facebook posts. In this post I shared a link to my recently published article “Beyond Matter: Object-disoriented Sound Art (2017)”, an original piece rereading of sound art history. With an undocumented charge, the scholar attacked me personally and made a public accusation that I have misinterpreted his work in a few citations. I have followed this much-admired scholar’s work, but I never met him personally. As I closely read and investigated the concerned citations, I found that the three minor occasions when I have cited his work neither aimed at misrepresenting his work (there was little chance), nor were they part of the primary argument and discourse I was developing.

What made him react so abruptly? I have enjoyed reading his work during my research and my way of dealing with him has been respectful, but why couldn’t he respect me in return? Why couldn’t he engage with me in a scholarly manner within the context of a conversation rather than making a thoughtless comment in public aiming to hurt my reputation?

Consider the social positioning. This scholar is a well-established white male senior academic, while I am a young and relatively unknown researcher with a non-white, non-European background, entering an arena of sound studies which is yet closely guarded by the Western, predominantly white, male academics. This social divide cannot be ignored in finding reasons for his outburst. I immediately sensed condescension and entitlement in his behavior. [. . .Click here for more!]

 

1). Botanical Rhythms: A Field Guide to Plant Music

Carlo Patrão

Only overhead the sweet nightingale

Ever sang more sweet as the day might fail,

And snatches of its Elysian chant

Were mixed with the dreams of the Sensitive Plant

Percy Shelley, The Sensitive Plant, 1820

 

ROOT: Sounds from the Invisible Plant

Plants are the most abundant life form visible to us. Despite their ubiquitous presence, most of the times we still fail to notice them. The botanists James Wandersee and Elizabeth Schussler call it “plant blindness, an extremely prevalent condition characterized by the inability to see or notice the plants in one’s immediate environment. Mathew Hall, author of Plants as Persons, argues that our neglect towards plant life is partly influenced by the drive in Western thought towards separation, exclusion, and hierarchy. Our bias towards animals, or zoochauvinism–in particular toward large mammals with forward facing eyes–has been shown to have negative implications on funding towards plant conservation. Plants are as threatened as mammals according to Kew’s global assessment of the status of plant life known to science. Curriculum reforms to increase plant representation and engaging students in active learning and contact with local flora are some of the suggested measures to counter our plant blindness.

Participatory art including plants might help dissipate plants’ invisibility. Some authors argue that meaningful experiences involving a multiplicity of senses can potentially engage emotional responses and concern towards plants life. In this article, I map out a brief history of the different musical and sound art practices that incorporate plants and discuss the ethics of plant life as a performative participant. [. . .Click here for more!]

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Featured Image: “SO! stamp” by j. Stoever

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 tape reelREWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

The Top Ten Sounding Out! Posts of 2017!

The Top Ten Sounding Out! Posts of 2016!

The Top Ten Sounding Out! Posts of 2015!

Blog-o-versary Podcast EPISODE 62: ¡¡¡¡RESIST!!!!

Janneke Adema

Vol 4 No 1 Call For Submissions

Writing from Below is now accepting papers for an open-themed issue, volume four, number one. We welcome papers and creative works that engage with Gender, Sexuality and Diversity Studies from across all disciplines, and from academics at all stages of their careers.

All submissions will be peer reviewed, including creative works with accompanying ERA statements (see creative submission and ERA statement examples in our “Art(i)culations of Violence” special issue). Text based submissions should be between 3,000 and 7,000 words and should adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style. If you’re submitting artwork, sound or video files, or have queries about any complex or unusual submissions, please email amelia.walker@unisa.edu.au and CC q.eades@latrobe.edu.au.

The deadline for submissions is 30th January 2019.

Please note: all submissions are handled using an online process. To proceed, set up an author account and follow the simple steps.

Writing from Below is a peer-reviewed, open access journal, supported by La Trobe University.

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Sounding Out!

Femmes Fucking the Camera: Listening to the Sonics of Boudoir Photography

Pictured above are Raven VonScruptious (right) an Sepia Jewel (left), two burlesque dancers from San Diego, California. Raven and Sepia started “eye fucking” in burlesque classes with Coco L’Amour and later they transferred these gestures to the photo studio and the stage,  gestures that as Juana Maria Rodriguez notes, “dance, flirt and fuck” (2014). “Eye fucking” is transmitting tease, a play with your audience that is coquettish. Eye fucking entails going beyond the gaze of the audience into a realm where you meet your inner erotic, your inner gaze. Eye fucking creates arousal, homosociality, agency, femme desire, confidence, and a queer space with a lot of glitter.  As Smiley LaRose—the name I chose to take on as my student burlesque name—I have learned to “fuck the camera lens” from these two women and the burlesque community in San Diego, who encourage me to embrace what Celine Parreñas Shimizu calls “productive perversity.”  

In this post, I reflect on the sonic intimacies between burlesque and boudoir photography. I am sharing part of a larger film project titled #GlitterBabes, where I tell a story of how burlesque as a recreational practice empowers women to engage their sensual selves.  The film came about when I signed up for a Soloist Workshop and my burlesque stage persona Smiley LaRose was born. I tell this story through Glitter Tribe Studio, the first studio dedicated to the art of burlesque in San Diego.

In fact, both the dance and photography studios I write about here have an intimate relationship. The film starts with Smiley’s curiosity about how her classmates and teachers engaged the art of tease and navigated all the different aspects of it. As a fat performer, I was particularly interested in the way that my burlesque sisters and myself would navigate topics of body confidence, sensuality and stripping. As it turned out, these practices require a practice of listening to the details of our bodies and its engagement with musicality, the rhythm of our tease(s), and our awareness for how the camera can capture our corporeal erotic wavelengths both on and off stage.

In other words, I engage in ‘dirty listening’ to describe the sonics of boudoir photography and the erotic sounds that go into capturing sensuality in its most intimate ways. In their qualitative study of erotic photographers, Wentland and Muise found that in order to have a successful shoot it was crucial to create “relaxing and comfortable” spaces for femmes. A common practice among the photographers was to have “constant dialogue with their clients, both at the beginning and during the photo shoot, in order to help their clients relax.” They allowed femmes to have control over the shoot and explained every step along the way.  In fact, as photo shoots progressed, several clients “requested shots that were more revealing than what they had initially discussed” (106). The findings by Wentland and Muise share many commonalities with the way photographers in San Diego also engage the practice of Boudoir, particularly the understanding that agency is experienced along a continuum and photographers support their clients by accommodating different techniques that can silence their negative self-talk.

At Bad Kitty Photography, where both Raven and Sepia had their shoots, a layer enabling femmes to get into an affective state of sensual comfort is music. To prepare for shoots, Bad Kitty asks their clients to think about their favorite music to set the mood. On their website, they list creating a music playlist as a recommendation to prepare for the shoot. This recommendation intrigued me and aroused an intellectual sonic orgasm. As a scholar of music, sound, and sexuality, their suggestion reminded me of a post by Robin James, where she argues that  “we can understand the physical pleasures of listening to music, music making, and music performance as kinds of sexual pleasure.” In Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music, Roshanak Khesti has described the erotic aspects of aurality, and has described the ear, as an ‘invaginated organ’ that penetrates the body with pleasure-in-listening. Here, music is consumed in a femme-centered space to get the model and its photographer to a state of intoxicating perversity.

Beyond the music recommendation, the photographer who worked with me also used sonic techniques to help me get relaxed and comfortable. Ashley Rae, aka “My Bomb Ass photographer,” no longer works at Bad Kitty, but her impact there particularly with other women of color clients is remembered.  While we were choosing my outfits, I shared with Ashley, how nervous I was about not being able to make sexy faces. She looked at me and said, “It’s easy! All you have to do is pronounce ‘juice.’” She later asked me to look at the mirror while I practiced. The trick in the exercise was how slow I said “juice” the slowness and softness or my pronunciation created a shape in my lips that unconsciously also influenced the way my eyes moved. After juice she told me to pronounce “prune.” Ppppp-rrrr-uuuuuuu-nnnnnn—ee.

I look at my photos and I see the effect it created. “vocal utterances function as another kind of embodied gesture – opening the mouth and projecting sounds, words, and breath imprinted by the unique physical qualities of our inhabited bodily instruments,” as she points out in Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and other Latina Longings (124).

She spoke dirty to me and I liked it.

“Give me more bootyhole,” Ashley said.

Rodriguez asks, “what happens when I talk dirty to you? How does the address of speech transform the performative gesture of its utterance?” (125).  Dirty talk– how my photographer engaged me in dialogue – contributed to my afloje (looseness) as the shoot progressed. The address of her speech, along with her gestures, made me get lost in her camera. Witnessing the way she touched herself–and the way she wanted me to touch my body–formed a collective vision of sensuality, one where all femmes of color could feel like goddesses.  It was her dirty talk, the tone of her voice, and the power of her Black Femme gaze that helped me get there. Following Audre Lorde’s vision for the power of the erotics, we imaged a different world with her camera, a world where femmes eye fuck each other, and for each other, constantly displacing the male gaze. Her foreplay allowed me to listen to how my Eyes Talked, My Eyes Teased, My Eyes Fucked.

Beyond the shoot, the boudoir photos that she took of me would capture forever the fat perversity that she inspired in me. The energy we created inside that studio lingers in my skin. I remember her dirty talk and when we pose, my friends who have also gone through her spell also say, “give me more bootyhole” Like that, my remix yells “si, metete con mi Cucu!”

As a fat student of burlesque, my dirty talk, my dirty listening, is inspired by other women of color, fat performers, and porn stars. I gaze upon them for inspiration, guidance on eye fucking, and poses. On March 9, 2018, I participated in the second annual Plus Size Art Show at Meseeka Art studio in San Diego, California. I submitted 20 pieces of boudoir photography to the show that celebrated the bodies of five women of color plus-size burlesque performers from San Diego. They included Buttah Love, Raven VonScrumptious, Lucy May, Sepia Jewel and Smiley LaRose. The other art pieces in the show also centered fat perversity by presenting women in shibari, bikinis, nude, and boudoir.

Photographed by Ahnyung Nadine

The all-women DJ collective Chulita Vinyl Club de San Diego played at the show while people danced, drank, and viewed the live fat artwork in formation.  Listening to the charlas in the room, you could hear fat women share the power they felt from seeing other fat women feeling sexy. One of the participants approached Sepia and Smiley to ask us if we were also exhibited in the artwork. We both pointed at our images, celebrating each other by complementing our sexy poses. She told us that it was her first time ever taking photos in lingerie, and that playing with the shoot was empowering. We both agreed, because as burlesque dancers and students, stripping to nakedness has had multiple effects on the way we viewed our bodies, and their sensuality. Can you listen to how we use boudoir, erotic art and burlesque to create a visual archive of fat-sex-positivity?

Although Raven was not able to attend the opening of the show, she saw it through Buttah’s Instagram story. When I texted Raven, she told me she almost cried from seeing her photos framed on the wall. Raven was art, a fat femme was art. But even though she was not there, her photos transmitted energy and a fat perversity: her fat eyes talked, her fat eyes teased, her fat eyes fucked us.

Prrruuuuuu-nnnnnnneeeeee  

We moan.

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All images courtesy of the author.

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Yessica Garcia Hernandez is a doctoral candidate and filmmaker in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California San Diego. Her scholarship bridges fan studies, sound studies, women of color feminisms, fat studies, girl studies, and sexuality/porn studies to think about intergenerational fans of Mexican regional music. Yessica earned her B.A. in Chicanx Studies from University of California, Riverside and an M.A. in Chicanx and Latinx Studies at California State University Los Angeles. She has published in the Journal of Popular Music, New American Notes Online, Imagining America, Journal of Ethnomusicology, and the Chicana/Latina Studies Journal. Her dissertation entitled, “Boobs and Booze: Jenni Rivera, the Erotics of Transnational Fandom, and Sonic Pedagogies” examines the ways in which Jenni Rivera fans reimagine age, gender, sexuality, motherhood, and class by listening to her music, engaging in fandom, and participating in web communities. She explores the social element of their gatherings, both inside and outside the concert space, and probe how these moments foreground transmissions of Latina power. Yessica’s broader research interests includes paisa party crews, Banda Sinaloense, Contestaciones, and Gordibuena/BBW erotics. She is a co-founder and member of the Rebel Quinceañera Collective, a project that utilizes art, music, photography, creative writing, filmmaking, and charlas to activate spaces for self-expression and radical education by and for youth of color in San Diego.

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tape reelREWIND!…If you liked this post, check out:

Unapologetic Paisa Chingona-ness: Listening to Fans’ Sonic Identities–Yessica Garcia Hernandez

LMGM’s “Lost: Choirboy” & El Jefe’s “Muñoz & La Mission: A Sermon. . .” (in memoriam José Esteban Muñoz)

Freedom Back: Sounding Black Feminist History, Courtesy the Artists– Tavia Nyong’o

Mediated Sexuality in ASMR Videos–Emma Leigh Waldron

INC

Het Internet Genezen – Marleen Stikker – 6 December @ FLOOR, Wibauthuis

Het Internet genezen - Marleen Stikker

Graag nodigen wij je uit voor het evenement: ‘Het internet genezen’!

Filosoof en internetpionier Marleen Stikker is te gast bij HvA Debatcentrum FLOOR. Zij richtte de Waag Society op, een instituut voor technologie en samenleving dat pioniert op het gebied van opkomende technologieën. Marleen kijkt kritisch naar technologieën en tools die internetgiganten ons aanbieden. Zij zal ons meenemen in de online wereld en wellicht het internet genezen!

Datum en tijd
Donderdag 6 december 2018
17:00 – 17:45 uur – Marleen Stikker

18:00 – 21:00 uur – Aflevering VPRO Zomergasten van Marleen Stikker

Locatie
FLOOR-zaal, Wibauthuis, Wibautstraat 3b, 1091 GH Amsterdam

 Het programma

16:30 uur – Inloop
17:00 uur – Opening door Geert Lovink (Lector Network Cultures)
17:05 uur – Q&A met Marleen Stikker
17:45 uur – Pauze
18:00 uur – Aflevering VPRO Zomergasten van Marleen Stikker
21:00 uur – Einde

Zoals alle FLOOR-evenementen is ‘Het internet genezen’ ook gratis. Meld je aan en weet zeker dat je een plekje hebt.

AANMELDEN

INC

The Sad Fallacies of Redditor Rhetoric

On November 23rd 2018, Pim van den Berg published Execute Order 66: How Star Wars Memes Became Indebted to Fascist Dictatorship on the INC website. In line with The Case Against the Jedi Order, Pim’s text is critical of the politics of Star Wars meme culture. It was read about 3700 times and caused controversy on r/KotakuInAction – an old-school meeting place for gamergaters (the men that started a campaign against the corrupting influence of women and people of color in gaming under the flag of ‘ethical game journalism’). An aggressive string of comments exhibiting a stunning variety of fallacies denounce Execute Order 66 and its author. Let’s buckle up and dive into the rhetoric Pim’s article provoked.

 

The I’m-not-even-going-argue-with-you-cuck

Some people like to keep it simple. In this case, the simplest blow is below the belt: disregarding any content matter and instead directly targeting the author as a person. This fallacy, also referred to as ad hominem,might funnily invoke radioactive Vice authors or question the financial situation/education of the writer. It can also be a ‘roundabout’ advise to the author to commit suicide. 

You need to get bitten by a radioactive Vice writer.

How the fuck does someone make a living writing shit like that?

I just kind of skimmed to chuckle at the shitty, fake “education” the author underwent. That’s always fun to do with these long-winded diatribes.

Now I’m not saying the writer should hang themselves,but I’m not saying they shouldn’t either.

The latter comment was deleted by the moderator of r/KiA but remains readable as a quote. Neither one of these comments are actual arguments, but they do indicate the rhetoric of Star Wars geek meme culture.

 

The this-article-is-a-crime

Other commenters take to a more noble and sophisticated type of ranting, not targeting the author directly, but suggesting that this article is a criminal entity (salt fest/breed of stupidity) which brings direct harm to the reader (cancer) and should therefore be punished accordingly (smeared with shit).

That article gave me cancer. 

This is all a salt fest over TLJ [the Last Jedi].

Theres more stretches in this article than a yoga manual.

I’ve seen garbage tier Star Wars articles but this is a new breed of stupidity. I hope Uncle Ethan tears into it.

Why can’t that author live a normal life instead of crying about people having fun using fictional villains in fictional universes?

I think I’m gonna print this article out. So I can actually shit on it.

This is so tiresome. Can we start to discuss actual arguments instead of slander?

 

The stop-attacking-said-geeks-already-you-cultural-imperialist

The most upvoted argument against Pim’s article is an attack-as-defense:

Maybe they should stop attacking said geeks for a moment? A radical notion, I know.

This often-seen type of argument takes any critique of geek culture as an attack on an innocent marginalized and adorkable subculture. Such an attack might be characterized by geeks asa random act of aggression, a deliberate post-modern identity-political reverse sexist witch-hunt, or an instance of cultural gentrification.

 It’s just shit slinging with a veneer of pomo jargon. Might as well be yelling garbled insults at passerbyes in parks. 

This is Maslow’s hammer … “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”, You’ll find zealots of the new Progressive Cathedral wield it to pound round pegs into square holes. They are indoctrinated into one form of criticism, one frame of reference; They will preceive everything through that lens/frame no matter how the original subject matter is warped by that distortion.

There’s a concept that if you don’t try as hard as possible to attack and demean a person or group, they won’t do it back. Someone teach this to leftists and sjws.

It’s made up, sexist bullshit. Yes, we don’t like certain types of people bargaining in and making demands/throwing shade, but that has nothing to do with race, gender, sexual orientation and so on, on both sides. tl;dr: Normies get out reeeeeee.

They didn’t hate [geeks] back [in the 70’s and 80’s]. You were just weirdos that they had vague distaste for and never interacted with or acknowledged if they could help it. Now they hate you because you’re sitting on a cultural niche that is suddenly valuable and valued, and resisting their efforts to colonise it. They didn’t give a shit about your country, but then one of your natural resources suddenly became valuable.

What, you don’t love cultural gentrification?

Literally cultural imperialism. Social Justice Leopolds!

It’s great having a voice of our own, which the fascists want to take away, while calling us fascists lol.

Well, they’re the ones who called us nazis.

Cynically, with the rise of geek culture’s popularity, the marginal position claimed by geeks as the basis of entitlement to send death wishes to their enemies has clearly ceased to exist (if it ever really existed). In Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media, A. Salter & B. Blodgett argue:“Geekdom is at a crossroads. Once defined by their outside status and victimization, geeks are now powerful enough as a subculture to make victims out of others, particularly those perceived as lacking the credential earned through suffering that makes one a “true” outsider geek.” (p.12)

According to the ‘’true’’ geeks, then, calling out their racism, sexism and fascism for what it is, is blaming the victim. We, normies, should leave the innocent geeks alone, or meet their wrath. LOL, not gonna happen. As The Pop Culture Detective pointed out using the case of The Big Bang Theory, adorkable misogyny is still misogyny. The same goes here: clumsy light saber fascism is still fascism.

 

The you-don’t-know-us-you-can’t-judge-us

Are we right in critiquing the crowd of anonymous Redditors as a unified political or identitarian homogeneity? Some Redditors point at the impossibility of empirically confirming the homogeneity of the gender, sex, and class of the commenters. Others admit that toxic masculinity in geek culture is a thing but argue that it is only present in a small (and therefore harmless?) part of the community.

How the hell can anyone in there tell if someone is a white man when they’re all a bunch anons saying “hello there” and “General Kenobi,” and if someone does bring up real-world politics all you get is “oh, I’m not brave enough for politics,” or “so this is how democracy dies.”

Literally ‘the people we don’t like are white, male, basement-dwelling losers’. Yaknow why people hate these people? Because of armchair psychology like this.

Those [geek masculine] types exist, of course, but it doesn’t really make sense why their behavior, which may or may not be some sort of ersatz masculinity, would be the declared the standard for all male geeks. There is a difference between probing if someone is actually into a hobby, and being that prick, who, in my opinion, really is just clinging hard to the one thing he knows, because he thinks being an expert on it is all he has going for him in life.

It seems like these defenders of the geek cause did not make the effort to read all other comments, or they would have noticed that most other comments ferociously and violently defend exactly the homogeneity they deny exists (see the WE-ARE-NOT-PATHETIC! below). Also, can you seriously deny that geek culture is white and male-dominated? Can you really call it nitpicking to critique the violent nature of a community’s culture, when members of that community respond with roundabout suicide advice?

 

The our-innocent-culture-is-not-political-even-though-it-is

Despite the existence of subreddits like r/empiredidnothingwrong, some argue that Star Wars memes are an apolitical cultural phenomenon. In a reaction to the controversy around his article, Pim van den Berg states: ‘I first wanted to share this article on r/starwars, but they have a strong ‘no real-world politics’-policy. Complete bullshit, of course.’ True. It is bullshit. But it’s also bullshit with a function.

Holy shit complaining about meme LMAOOOOOOO

All anyone does on r/prequelmemes is quote the prequels.

I also noticed that the author gave numerous example of harmless memes and could only sometime cited memes that were “problematic” only if you intentionally and obtusely misconstrued them’’

The Left can’t meme because tyrants have no sense of humor. That’s the easiest way to spot a tyrant – they’re the ones that try to shoot the court jester. The Right used to be the tyrants, but now the Left are for some strange reason.

Exactly in being apolitical, in being mere humorous memes, Star Wars memes are argued to fulfil the political role of the court jester – the powerless using humor to speak truth in the face of power. And, of course, it is the moralist, post-modern, identity-political, purist Left that does not allow for such parrhesiastic practice. Start Wars memes are only (Right-wing) political in being humorously apolitical and are therefore harmed in their political role when addressed (by the Left) as directly political.

 

The leave-my-hero-George-Lucas-alone

Surprisingly often, the slander of the article and its author recedes back into technical geeky elaborations of the Star Wars universe within a few comments – Is Jar Jar a convincing character? Are the ten-minute light-saber fights sped up or not? ARE THE PREQUELS BETTER MOVIES THAN THE SEQUELS? This results in a specific type of the our-innocent-culture-is-not-political-even-though-it-is, which emphasizes the genius authority of Georg Lucas. 

You have to like the sequels or you’re a bad person who hates women and minorities. Like the sequels or you’re a fascist. The prequels are flawed movies that embrace one man’s vision, right or wrong, and you’re free to agree or disagree, the sequels are a studio produced work of a giant company and you either like it….or else. I’ll take the prequels any day of the week. We all thought the prequels were as bad as it could ever get, but today is really the dark times of the empire.

Everything about the prequels is Pure George Lucas, for all the good and the bad that implies.

This argument (a Rich White Man’s Vision is a Rich White Man’s Vision) neutralizes any critique of the Star Wars Prequels commenters’ communities’ sexism, racism, and fascism by calling upon the individual Vision of their genius creator George Lucas. You can’t expect a genius to be politically correct, right?

 

The WE-ARE-NOT-PATHETIC!

The ultimate fallacy is a falsely debunked fallacy. In this case, a combination of a wrongly diagnosed non-sequitur(a cause-effect argument which does not concern the necessity it presents to concern)combined with a wrongly diagnosed lawyer’s question (a false dilemma of two options) tops the iceberg of toxic geek masculinity.

I love my life, beautiful wife, good job, a couple of properties under my belt everything I could realistically want. AND I am a massive geek and hate social justice warriors.

Did the article ever state that you don’t love your life filled with toxic geek masculinity? Does having a wife and a ‘couple of properties under your belt’ exclude the possibility of you being pathetically racist, sexist, and/or fascist? Do you realise that, by saying this, not only are you pleading guilty as charged, but you also show that you simply lack the moral compass to see why you are wrong?

We are left to draw a sad conclusion. In reaction to Pim’s critique, no effort was spared to write death threats, ad hominems, non-sequiturs, lawyer’s questions, shit-slinging, community-defending, anti-social justice warrior rants, claims of innocence, and geekily repetitive Star Wars nitpicking. Yet, no single Redditor r/KiA ever engaged with the actual observations and arguments in Execute Order 66. Under the pretense of ethical game journalism, r/KiA upholds an echo chamber of affirmative tautologies and a culture in which rage-filled fallacies are accepted and normalized. https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/9zs1x2/star_wars_memes_became_indebted_to_fascist/ shows what every white male gamer, including myself, knows deep down: geek culture is driven by sadness, frustration and insecurity.

Sounding Out!

SO! Podcast #72: Not Your Muse (Episode 1 feat. Hailey Niswanger)

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD:  SO! Podcast #72: Not Your Muse (Episode 1 feat. Hailey Niswanger)

SUBSCRIBE TO THE SERIES VIA ITUNES

ADD OUR PODCASTS TO YOUR STITCHER FAVORITES PLAYLIST

Not Your Muse is a podcast series that dissects the unique experience of being a woman in the music industry. Each episode features an interview with a different artist; we talk about their entry into music, and the struggles and triumphs that followed. The goal of this series is to bring attention to the sexism, both blatant and subtle, that women have to process as professionals.
Our debut episode features Hailey Niswanger, a 28-year-old experimental jazz artist based in Brooklyn, NY. From playing Saturday Night Live to touring with Esperanza Spalding, Hailey’s career has been nothing short of extraordinary. So what did she do when her former mentor, who helped shape her relationship with music, crossed a line? Listen in to learn more about her story.
Links to Hailey’s work:

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Featured image used with permission by the author.

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Allison Young is a Binghamton University graduate with a passion for media and its place in social activism and culture. Her positions as publisher of Free Press, Binghamton University’s only free-format arts and culture magazine, and music director of the Binghamtontincs, the campus’ oldest co-ed a cappella group, have fueled her support of the arts and its symbiotic relationship to success. She believes storytelling has the unique ability to connect and shape our society for the better–sometimes the best thing we can do is just listen.

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tape reelREWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Sounding Out! Podcast #63: The Sonic Landscapes of Unwelcome: Women of Color, Sonic Harassment, and Public Space— Mala Muñoz and Diosa Femme

SO! Amplifies: The Women in L.A. Punk Archive— Alice Bag

Sounding Out! Podcast #59: Soundwalk of the Women’s March, Santa Ana— Aaron Trammell

INC

The Universe of [  ] Images Symposium 23 November

“ The long-held idea of images as proof of reality vanished. Washed away by manipulative practices of image production our hyper-visual media streams have become highly subjective and emotional. Authenticity claims to be the new challenge while power structures shift and users become creators.”

On Friday 23 November, Hackers & Designers, together with Froh! organized a lecture evening to kick off the two 48-hour workshops ‘The Universe of [  ] Images’. The evening and first workshop were hosted by Fanfare. The second workshop will be held in December in Cologne.

In these workshops journalists, designers, artists, filmmakers, hackers are invited to explore and experiment with the role of technical applications within the de-/construction and perception of (visual) truth, now that images no longer serve as pieces of evidence. How can the tools that are built and used shape how media is published and consumed?

The evening set the context for the workshops and was kicked off by Fanfare with a presentation about physical publishing and their history as a nomadic studio and non-profit platform for graphic design and visual arts. Their nomadic existence forced them to design a traveling display for exhibitions that was flexible but also enabled them to retain their identity.

Next was an interactive presentation about Aesthetic Warfare by Arthur Steiner and Leonardo Dellanoce. They initiated the Digital Earth Fellowship program, and are co-curating Vertical Atlas, a research project investigating the use of the Stack methodology as a way construct new maps to navigate the layered, interconnected and disconnected technological realities, as current maps fail to capture these complexities. The presentation illustrated some localities of the universe of [ ] images with three stories from different geozones.

The next Vertical Atlas focusses on the Russian digital cosmos, with two public events: 29 November at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam and 2 December at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Closing the evening, Colm O’Neill, a designer and researcher concerned with mediations of digital literacy, talked about adversarial interfaces as a way of critically looking at interface design. Colm’s presentation can be found here: http://adversarial.interfaces.site/pages/introduction.html

With the presentations the participants of the workshops were given interesting questions and cases to start exploring, navigating and perhaps designing a new universe of [  ] images.

The title of the symposium and workshops is based on the book ‘Into the Universe of Technical Images’ by Vilém Flusser.