ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes an examination of sound through a feminist lens. In it, we argue that it is necessary to make visible gendered concepts of sound and listening that impact on women’s engagement with and relationship to sound and music performance. Between 2017 and 2018, Nogueira and O Keeffe created a body of art works which fed into the development of a new methodology and the design of a series of methods. The methods, conducted with a number of women, teenage girls and female-identifying collectives in Brazil, examined how women respond to and are shaped by our everyday experience of different soundscapes. Through a series of discussions, performances and workshops, we examined whether sound and listening had become a gendered experience, and if so, what impact this might have on their relationship to the sonic arts and music production and performance. We propose that this methodology can support embodied examinations of socio-cultural spaces, which consider senses of place and decolonial perspectives. These embodied perspectives, traditionally linked to feminists’ methods, will then find a place to support practitioners in the creative and sonic arts.
