ABSTRACT
Students of radio come from many disciplines, and if we bring with us an analytical approach centred principally on the printed word, we miss an entire component of what makes radio what it is: the power and intimacy of the human voice. And those voices – always and already gendered – in turn shape the gendered dimensions of citizenship and the public sphere. This chapter uses the cases of the two most prominent First Ladies of radio – Eleanor Roosevelt and ‘Evita’ Perón – to launch a discussion of ways we might ‘unmute’ and gender the history of radio. Particular attention will be dedicated to the place, performance, and reception of voices gendered female on the radio airwaves. Attention to vocal gender in radio is not limited to voices characterized as female; all radio scholars benefit from closer attention to the way gender is always, already part of the ‘message’ carried by the ‘medium’ of the human voice. This chapter will seek to encourage radio scholars to consider voice and vocal gender as it relates to their areas of research, and further integrate both gender studies and sound studies into interdisciplinary radio scholarship.
