I have been really interested recently in the politics of noise and silence. I have been particularly inspired by Marie Thompson’s writing ‘Gossips, Sirens, Hi-Fi Wives: Feminizing the Threat of Noise’ (Resonances, 2013) and Thompson’s proposal of “an alternative politics of noise, which distinguishes itself from the legacies of both Futurist noise and Cagean Silence.”
“On the one hand, notions of frivolity, triviality and pettiness mark the sounds characterized as feminine. Women’s talk is degraded as extraneous and meaningless, likened to the non-verbal braying and clucking of animals. However, despite their apparent triviality and meaninglessness, feminine noises are also dangerous, wicked and damaging, serving to rupture moral and social orders. In turn, women’s noises are to be abated; they are to remain veiled in silence, their sonic presence regulated by the masculinized structures of morality.” (Thompson 2013, p301)
In response to Thompson essay and to expand upon their theory, I was inspired to look further into how trans-feminine noises might be seen as unwanted, dangerous or “to be abated”. In particular, I looked into the trans-feminine voice and how it might be read as noise. Trans-feminine voices are heard as “noises within the system; they are disruptive, transitional bodies that cannot be constituted in relation to normative dualisms”.
My particular agenda that I want to emphasise here is that cis-normative ways of reading voices in certain ways: that ‘women’s voices are typically high and men’s are typically low’ is reductive and we should move beyond gendering sound in this way. A woman’s voice can be deep, and this sound is still feminine. Sound shouldn’t have any relation to the identification of a voice. The identity of the voice simply belongs to the identity of the person. In fact, our cultural associations with a voice that is deep, being ‘commanding’ or ‘powerful’, and tied to being a man – are from patriarchal and hegemonic conventions. Moving away from this is a liberation of feminine noises, from feminine noises being characterised as “frivolity, triviality and pettiness” (Thompson) – to being able to be deep and bassy empowers us to stretch our capacity of listening beyond binaries.
Wrapped up in this are considerations of transphobic discriminations of silencing of this transfeminine noise. Again, noise and silence always have a politics to them. The voice of a transphobic person is another kind of noise which may push out a trans voice from the space – as an attempt to silence the threat of feminine noise and the rupture of a transfeminine body in a system.
References:
Thompson, M (2013) “Gossips, Sirens, Hi-Fi Wives: Feminizing the Threat of Noise”Resonances: Noise and Contemporary Music. New York: Bloomsbury.