ABSTRACT
To the extent that sound has been treated as secondary, subordinate, and supplementary to the visual dimension of cinema, critical consideration of its nature and function has often been rendered in terms of gender. Viewed within the frame of the “ideology of the visible” (Doane 1985a: 55) that has dominated Western epistemology, sound stands opposed to vision in an implicitly gendered hierarchy that associates rational knowledge and the mastery afforded by the distance between viewer and object of vision with the sense of sight, and sound in its elusive yet enveloping presentness with “the emotional and the intuitive” (ibid.). In privileging the role of the visible over the audible and seeing over hearing, mainstream film theory and criticism have left these categories largely intact. Indeed, the first serious academic studies of film sound published in the 1980s can be seen
to reinforce the then dominant psychoanalytic paradigm in its understanding of cinema as a primarily visual medium structured by a controlling male gaze. Yet as the work of Laura Mulvey and other feminist theorists was read to exclude a role for women as anything but the projection of male desire, subsequent critics began to look to cinema sound in its different components, including music and voice, as a way to rescue a place for the female subject and feminine agency both within and beyond the film text. Pursuing such a notion, in La voix au cine´ma French composer and sound theorist Michel Chion points to the promise of sound and rhythms as a potential “territory of freedom” for feminists, a fluid and musical domain rich in meanings and pleasures (1982: 8-10). To provide a critical overview of the study of film sound and gender is to trace an arc from
those initial and still influential approaches that consider the soundtrack as constrained by the same structural and cultural binaries and biases that regulate the gendered visual regime of cinema-and that largely concentrate their focus on the canon of classic Hollywood cinema-to other, recent studies informed by a plural and experiential model of spectatorship that also venture beyond the Anglo-European film canon. Increasingly attentive to cultural, sexual, and racial/ethnic differences, this work also incorporates a new set of conceptual and methodological models and reading strategies, including empirical and phenomenological approaches and queer studies. In seeking to present the key arguments that have shaped the debates over film sound and gender, I have organized the discussion that follows in two primary blocks, the first devoted to the analysis of film music and the
second to discussions of the voice that lead to a general consideration of the materiality of sound in the context of a body-centered, haptic cinema.
