ABSTRACT
1319. Abbate, Carolyn. "Opera, or the Envoicing of Women." In Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A, Solie, 225-58. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1993. In a reply to Catherine Clément's Opera, or the Undoing of Women, Abbate proposes that in fact opera is a genre "that so displaces the author's musical voice onto female characters and female singers that it largely reverses a conventional opposition of male (speaking) and female (observed) object." She suggests how principles of post structuralist theory can challenge this sort of gendering by pointing to a perception involving "multiple voices, a dispersal of authority [which are] suggested all but irresistibly by opera" (228-29).
