Among the many helpful contributions that Kemp has made to this conversation is the reminder to pay attention to—and indeed, for authors to, in a complicated and perhaps limited way, be accountable for—the ways in which phrases, words, references, etc., can hit bodies. That one phrase, “feminist philosophy,” stopped Kemp in her tracks, bringing to mind memories of painful and frustrating acts of erasure and exclusion, and “stir[ring] an anxious physical response in [her] chest (or heart)” reminds us that there is no such thing as a purely cognitive, ideally neutral exchange of ideas. We generate and receive ideas much as we generate and receive vocal sounds: as embodied beings, embedded in long-standing patterns of injustice, with histories that are older than our bodies. More to Kemp’s point: as co-authors who identify as white cishet women, we relied on the tools of feminist philosophy without a sufficiently explicit recognition that that academic discourse remains deeply marked by the habits, norms, and values of white supremacy, and that it is possible to name and challenge that heritage while simultaneously lifting up the crucial contributions that women of color have made to the field. Powerful though it may be, white supremacy has never succeeded completely in the erasure that it seeks, and so the task of dismantling the racism that has shaped feminist theory includes (but is not limited to) recentering feminist philosophical conversations on contributions made by people of the global majority of all genders. As we tarried with Kemp’s comment, we found ourselves reflecting on ways that structural and interpersonal dynamics—and perhaps more to the point, dynamics that muddy the structural/interpersonal distinction—shape lived experiences of sharing and receiving even the most theoretical of insights.

One of our responses to Kemp’s comment that we ended up reflecting on extensively was a peculiar disorientation. Where in Kemp’s response, we wondered, are our ideas? Where are the questions and commentary on the terms we had coined, insights we had generated, arguments we had made? We were listening for a certain orientation and direction, and found ourselves flailing a bit in its absence, and that flailing, imbued by a sense, if we’re honest, of not receiving that which we had expected, created a barrier to receiving what Kemp was offering. Kemp interrupted the rhythm of our thinking, our argumentation, our academic/intellectual breath. 

It was only in the process of becoming aware of our expectations, of what we were listening toward, that we could register them as both problematic and limiting. After all, although Sounding Bodies challenges some forms of academic discourse, particularly in its use of multiple disciplines and co-authorship, it is certainly legible within academic conversations, and becomes so by participating in conventions that have been used to exclude entire social groups. That legibility, that discursive belonging, is directly related to our expectations. We presumed  to be replied to in kind. But to be replied to in kind would necessitate, or at least make more likely, the perpetuation of those very exclusions. In order to be able to receive Kemp’s response, then, we needed to put aside those assumptions  and become able to hear other kinds of insights. 

That experience inspired us to think about different forms of barriers that can exist between and among interlocutors. Kemp ran up against a barrier in our work, a barrier of systemic exclusion and erasure that she needed to grapple with before she could engage substantially with our thought. We ran up against a barrier in hearing her critique, a barrier clearly manufactured by the whiteness of academic discourse that promises the kind of attention that requires the bracketing of the experiences of excluded groups, including people of color. We are grateful that in both cases, those barriers could be addressed in ways that (we hope) forward both justice and deepened understanding. But we’re also aware that not all barriers are pernicious, and not all should be overcome. For example, in Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (2020), Dylan Robinson informs the reader early on that there will be sections of the book that settler readers are not invited to read, stating “if you are a non-Indigenous, settler, ally, or xwelítem reader, I ask that you stop reading by the end of this page…The next section of the book…is written exclusively for Indigenous readers” (Robinson, 25). Consistent with the work’s analysis of settler listening practices as persistently extractive, the barrier that Robinson constructs is an attempt to protect indigenous knowledge from consumers who almost certainly do not have the capacities to receive it in a just and helpful way.

(Cahill, in a solo voice) In a small reading group that was reading Hungry Listening, I heard and shared different experiences with this exclusionary move, rare in its orientation toward settler readers. My own experience consisted of, on the first read of the book, skipping over the named sections in a conscious choice to honor the author’s request. When returning to the book in preparation for a meeting of the reading group, having forgotten which sections were subject to this request, I started leafing through the book, and wondered why there were no notes in the margins of certain pages. Had I failed to do the reading assigned by the group? (A horrific thought for this dutiful group member.) It took me a couple of minutes of starting to skim the material before I realized my mistake, a mistake that horrified me again; this was a serious transgression that I regretted. The two other members of the reading group, neither of whom identify as indigenous, had also skipped the sections, but knew other non-indigenous readers who had fairly blithely ignored the author’s request. 

(Return to co-authored voice) Robinson’s barrier puts the lie to the rarely challenged claim, a claim deeply embedded in the norms and values of a distinctly white liberalism, that the sharing of ideas and knowledge should take place with little or no accounting for and of social and political positionalities that shape capacities. If Kemp’s response helps to remind us that words impact bodies differently, Robinson’s request allows us to understand that not all knowledge is for all bodies. Exposing indigenous knowledge to extractive settler listening practices opens both the knowledge and indigenous knowers to epistemic violence and injustice, and potentially to direct and/or physical violence and injustice (if that claim seems hyperbolic, we recommend Hungry Listening for an extensive treatment of those causal links). Can settlers learn to receive indigenous knowledge in just ways? Perhaps; but surely the first step in that learning process is countering the settler sense of entitlement that rails against any epistemic boundary. The settler reader who ignores Robinson’s request almost certainly cannot receive the knowledge in those sections of the book justly.

(Hamel, in a solo voice) Kemp’s response to Sounding Bodies illuminated the ways in which academic discourse framed by its own history of social and political exclusion can live in the body of the reader in immediate and visceral ways. It also provided a context for understanding that this critical work is a dialogue between people in relationship; and in the case of Margaret and myself, we have trained as actors in shared spaces, have been mutually led in workshops by each other, have even been teaching colleagues briefly at the same institution, and have become friends. The nature of the acting method that we both continue to train in and explore is psychophysical in nature; and not only do we share ideas as colleagues, but we share practices as bodies who breathe, sound, imagine, and feel. Our academic discipline (theatre/performance) is one that directly accesses bodily memory, felt sensations and emotions, and the dynamics of relationship.

There can be a real tenderness and vulnerability in the exchange of challenging ideas, particularly in a professional friendship. As artists who have a strong intellectual bent, both Margaret and myself straddle spaces that tend not to easily align; in Chapter 6 of Sounding Bodies I refer specifically to the ways in which voice/acting trainers have felt excluded from Academic Discourse and have historically held anti-academic bias. And yet, this straddled space we inhabit is one that seems to blur the neat and tidy divisions between the artistic and the academic, the personal and the professional, sounding bodies and the written word. There were high personal stakes at work here; and in writing this piece to a friend there was I believe a fear that Kemp’s words might be taken personally on my part. In a very real way, I believe we both had moments of holding our breath, full of feeling, eager to connect and clear the air.

Central to this conversation are the ways in which expectations, assumptions, and beliefs have both been framed by long histories of exclusion, and continue to be felt in an immediate and bodily way that seem fundamental to the questions and investigations at the core of the book. Importantly, it is in this response that I am interested in what breath can provide in my responsibility (in a literal sense, too, of an “ability to respond”) to such critique: breath to imagine a reframing (a rewriting?) of the introduction to the book that might help remove barriers to access; breath to acknowledge with ease that we could not, and did not, as white authors, write Sounding Bodies outside the stream of white supremacy and its effects, and breath in not being at all surprised that we could in ways continue to be a conduit of it. 

And so I now write—full of gratitude—not only to have received a response from Margaret that was so deeply felt, personal, and challenging to an easy assumption of access, but that she took the risk to ask a colleague and friend to consider the ways in which the very history of the discipline of (feminist) philosophy in academic discourse had a weighty presence in her reading and how carefully she navigated that weight in her generous written (and spoken) response.

We are deeply grateful to Joshua St. Pierre for his response, particularly because it affirms for us the connections between his groundbreaking work and our own analysis, connections that we identified very early on in our thinking. In our reply to his contribution, we want to speak to two themes in particular: temporality and shame.

St. Pierre offers a crucial new line of thinking with his term “respiratory governance”—a pithy term that captures the technologies, institutions, and relationships that can be brought to bear to discipline the non-normative breathing subject into more normative breathing practices, and thus into more normative subjectivities. We are struck by the role that temporality plays in these ableist practices, and more specifically, in the value placed on the lived experience of temporality of speakers and breathers who benefit from the privileges endowed upon the abled. The cruel disciplines described by St. Pierre and Peers that aim to “mold me into a kind of person who used slow and easy breathing to achieve fluent (i.e. acceptable) communication,” it seems to us, were designed to protect the right of the privileged not to tarry. 

In our book, relying on the work of George Yancy and Alia Al-Saji, we emphasize the ethical importance, for members of privileged social groups, of tarrying, particularly in the moment where aesthetic or ethical meanings are being ascribed to vocalizations of members of marginalized social groups. In our work, tarrying is tied closely to the inescapable responsibility that is involved when human soundedness gains social and political meaning; slow down, we advise privileged folks, to try to gain a sense for how your listening practices are contributing to what these sounds mean for you.

But St. Pierre is calling us to recognize that ableist speaking norms render waiting for sound itself an affront to the privileged. Obviously, such waiting is particularly objectionable in the context of late capitalism, where immediate access to goods of all sorts (material goods, information) is viewed as a birthright of the privileged. To be forced to wait is to be degraded and dehumanized, and can incite fury: don’t you know who I am? Or: this better be worth the wait.

Temporally non-normative vocalizations, particularly those emanating from speakers who have rejected vocal disciplines due to their high existential cost (shame, self-blame), reveal that vocal interactions require a shared (although not necessarily symmetrical) loaning of the participants’ time. To have a vocal interaction with another person that is meaningfully interactive (harangues and monologues don’t count) requires that all involved accept that their time is not their own. If the metaphor of loaning seems too transactional and individualistic, perhaps it’s better to say that vocal interactions necessarily require the co-construction of temporal experience. The privileged tendency to see time as “mine,” such that the speaker who requires greater amounts of time to communicate the same words is insulting the privileged person by being overly demanding, is yet another facet of vocal injustice grounded in insufficiently relational models of the self and social relations.

Of course, neither vocal justice nor vocal generosity requires that all speakers be free to dictate to those receiving their vocalizations how long they will hold the floor. Once again, the practical nature of non-ideal theory is helpful here. Recognizing that the additional time required for a temporally non-normative speaker to participate in a vocal exchange is not only not an affront, but in fact an opportunity to gain important insight into the temporality of intervocality, is perfectly consistent with finding ways to resist the sonorous domination of the privileged, for whom taking up a disproportionate amount of airtime feels both natural and right. In terms of adopting practices that forward sonorous and vocal flourishing, and challenge practices of vocalizing and listening that perpetuate familiar (and some not so familiar) structures of inequality, interrupting the privileged and extending one’s role as listener beyond what feels natural in the company of a person who has been targeted by vocal injustice are crucial and mutually consistent strategies.

Let us now turn to our second theme: shame. Though there is an emphasis in Sounding Bodies on the mechanics of vocal policing as a persistent example of vocal injustice, St. Pierre’s response brings into focus the role that vocal shame has to play in the mechanics of the treatment of pathology and what is commonly taken up the “inevitable injustice” that clings to it. Shame is only mentioned a few of times in our book—always only in relationship to sexuality—though it is deeply worthy of attention as an inwardly directed emotional response to the feeling of powerlessness to live up to a perceived vocal (normative or ableist) ideal and the inevitable sense of being disconnected or out of relationship with others. When taken up through the lens of intervocality, the burden of shame falls upon the collective: the shared responsibility for one another’s voices and the necessity to understand the discomfort of shame not simply as a by-product of an mechanical vocal issue to be pathologized and then remedied, but as a discomfort that emerges out of being—as Hamel refers to in her single-authored chapter from Sounding Bodies—“somatically othered.” For St. Pierre—who describes hearing and hating his own stuttering voice—this somatic othering through the voice is a result of hearing the shameful mark of injustice in his vocal utterances. However, he also extends this experience to the feeling of shame associated with breath itself, and the onus to try to discipline breath into smooth control. Hamel refers also to the exhortations to access a fairly regular, moment-to-moment natural breathing rhythm, let alone an easy, pleasurable, and deeply felt sigh of relief commonly experienced in voice training as only masquerading as neutral and universal; in fact, they fail to recognize how different (racialized, classed, gendered) bodies can have radically different, and unequal, access to spaces that allow for free and easy breath, and “relaxation” in many settings is a privilege for many and not necessarily accessible to all on a moment’s notice. St. Pierre’s analysis demonstrates the role that ableism is specifically playing in the normalization of smooth, rhythmic breathing through disciplinary control. The disruptive fits and starts of the ill-at-ease and/or disabled produces an untenable dissonance for ableist cultures, even as they reveal breath as a target of sonic normalization.

St. Pierre also brings to the fore the particular shame that resides in “medical interdependency”—the alienating and dehumanizing dynamic of “expert” vs. “gimp.” In a beautiful anecdote about Danielle Peers and Lindsay Eales’ artistic response to respiratory interdependence—a crip dance performance—St. Pierre brings our attention to new possibilities for relationship through “radical, collaborative care.” The performance takes the form of a collective breathing sculpture, in which movers and audience alike fuse in a “breathing assemblage,” allowing the movement of breath and the oxygenation of moving muscles to highlight the deeply intersubjective aspects of shared air and collective care. Performers and audience “are moved” into new relationship across the borders of “fourth walls” and “prosceniums” by sharing air together, and perhaps even falling into a synchronization of breath and heartbeat not unlike the communal pushing that can occur in the context of childbirth, as we describe in chapter five of Sounding Bodies. 

Why is performance so well-suited to instantiate this possibility for shared air and collective care? Perhaps because it too has a strained and potent relationship to temporality. Live performance binds the audience and the performers together in a singular moment, even as it has the capacity to stretch, bend, and slow down the temporality of normal life. A performance that is all movement and/of breath, and that revels in the absence of words, exceeds and challenges normalized communication that privileges the smooth and efficacious flow/exchange of language and transactional verbal economy.

In offering us this image, St. Pierre creates the possibility of an alternative narrative of what the ethos of care might look like beyond the historical practices (and shaming effects) of respiratory governance. A politics of breath that is more just and inclusive will require new experiences of temporality and, relatedly, a transfer of shame from non-normative bodies to the structural injustices that seek to pathologize and marginalize them.

In his response, Antonio Ocampo-Guzman describes being shaken on a foundational, root level at the critical analysis of Linklater’s “freeing the natural voice” pedagogy we provide in Sounding Bodies. Like Ocampo-Guzman, co-author Hamel is a designated Linklater voice teacher who gravitated towards and embraced Linklater’s methodology for its own “radical” approach to voice: “at its roots” it embraced voice as an important feature of self, as a pathway towards more creative possibilities, and as a means to find personal, artistic, even political freedom. Ocampo-Guzman articulates a central tension in the pedagogical frame around the work: “although Linklater might appear to have been the product of education towards freedom” the culture of its teaching has veered towards an “education towards obedience.” This has led to an incredibly challenging paradox pedagogically, indeed a “rackety bridge”: exacting, hierarchical, and perfectionist on one side and ever-questioning, probing, even transgressive on the other. It is not altogether surprising that Linklater once spoke of as a child wanting to grow up to be either a policewoman or a missionary (discipline and order on one side, a “liberation theology” on the other); as she said, “it turned out she got to do both.” (Bridel 2019, 1:22:58).

In a 2021 panel discussion within the Linklater community, Daron Oram offered a venn diagram of the intersecting systems of influence on our practice: methodology, philosophy, and pedagogy. Principally, what teachers of the LVM (Linklater Voice Method, as it is now called) have undergone is a highly rigorous training in methodology: learning and embodying the exercises, understanding why they exist and flow in a certain way, and how to bring others to have an experience with and through them. The focus of our work in Sounding Bodies has been primarily on understanding the philosophical implications of the sounding human voice; toward that end, we discussed the philosophical traditions framing the approach to LVM, namely that of liberal humanism grounded in the Enlightenment principles of self-contained, autonomous, free human subject. 

This written response to Ocampo-Guzman occurs at the overlap of philosophy and pedagogy: the third intersecting circle, in which we are tasked with becoming conscious of where we are, where we’ve been, and where we may be going in voice (and actor) education as a discipline. Oram also broke this down into three pedagogical “buckets”: traditional pedagogy (the “banking model” of education that Paulo Freire is concerned with—the teacher filling the empty vessel of the student with their knowledge); constructivist pedagogy (where the teacher leads the student to have an experience so that they can discover knowledge as if for themselves); and critical pedagogy (where the means by which the educational process takes place consciously challenges and subverts its own power structures and centers the students’ pursuit of their own freedom). 

All three pedagogical orientations have been present in the teaching of Linklater’s work and the LVM teacher-training process. Ocampo-Guzman implies a traditional model which centers the teacher as expert and a learning-through-obedience; Oram suggested that Linklater teacher training methods employ a constructivist mode (teaching to lead a student to arrive, more or less, at the desired experience and/or conclusion), and author Hamel would suggest there was also a critical orientation to the work of teacher training wherein trainees are tasked with questioning, inventing, and resisting all-too-easy jargon so that ideas or language could not calcify or sediment the method and lose their power to activate vocal shifts Linklater insisted that the use of language was intentional and powerful, meant to awaken thought and experiences to be discovered and re-discovered anew. 

Ocampo-Guzman also rightly identifies the aspects of LVM which seem to be deeply aligned with Freire’s philosophy of freedom, in which strongly opposing forces meet at the site of education as struggle; oppressive forces (from without, then internalized within) that can be identified as both unconscious and conscious, so that the person can push against the effects of such social and political forces and progress towards an increasingly free state. Freire’s notion of freedom centers a dominant Enlightenment ideology, wherein power is seen as being exerted from above on the autonomous, sovereign individual. However, the passages of Sounding Bodies that have particularly stirred Ocampo-Guzman into disorientation and curiosity are those which are grounded in Foucault’s theory of power and introduce a different paradigm. Freire’s critical pedagogy “demands that learners discover their authentic voice, their historic destiny of emancipation” (Clemitshaw, 274). However,

The[se prescriptions] do not acknowledge the more nuanced and deeply inserted play of power in the institution and in the bodies of its inhabitants. The structures of power, seen in a Foucauldian sense, become less systematic, and more contingent and improvised. They become less externally oppressive and more internally embodied, integrated and constructive … Voices do not have a sovereign centre where freedom is a natural, but denied state, with the need to be liberated…

Whilst power is a central focus of analysis for Foucault, it is not conceived of as oppositional to the individual, but rather as necessary for the construction of individuals, less opposite to freedom, but rather the pre-requisite of the construction of regulated freedoms … Voices do not have an authenticity free of power, but rather are only brought into varied forms through power. (Clemitshaw 2013, 274)

In our Foucauldian analysis, we challenge the notion of the subject free from the influences of institutional and state power, but leave space for freedom in which power is recognized as instrumental in how we come to be human subjects. It’s everywhere, and shapes individuals, capacities, and self-image. We do not take it as a given that the accrued experiences of socialization—especially those that construct values, build capacities, and help to develop identity, culture, and belonging—will necessarily lead to dissonance, silence, or dehumanization in its many forms. Though institutional and cultural practices certainly have the potential to enact oppression and do harm, it is also through the historicity and even illogic of those structures that we can reframe experience, interrupt the contingencies of power, question, take a stand, and enact justice on a personal and political level. We are curious about the possibilities of a Foucauldian framework for an engaged, progressive pedagogy of voice and/or actor training might look like, in which self-awareness, self-care, and self-construction as well as disobedience, interruption, and resistance continue to be central to the work. The model of freeing the voice from the oppressive aspects of power does not seem wholly sufficient to this task. We at least need to augment this model with a recognition of the productive aspects of power in the voice as well, and in doing so move from the goal of vocal freedom to the goal of intentional activation of the voice. From a stance of vigilant skepticism, a view on power—how it flows, who has it, how it is exchanged, in the classroom itself, most crucially—can become the means whereby voice training can find new footing. Just as we are not particularly interested in any conversation about voice that doesn’t involve a conversation about selves and vocal identity (reducing a pedagogy of voice/speech to a mere skills-as-skills and fact-based understanding of voice-as-acoustics or sound will not save us, though we will to return to a discussion of the acquisition of voice-skills that are also “self-skills” shortly), we are not interested in talking about a pedagogy of voice without taking into account the complexities of power which confront (and comprise) the experience of the complex, intersectional, becoming self in the voice classroom.

And so, as one very small example, there is an early exercise in LVM which asks the student to picture “what is preventing my voice as it is now from being the voice I would like it to be” as a front-line of struggle to identify emotional, physical, and mental blocks that are points where external or internalized forces have limited one’s vocal power and freedom. Thought Hamel continues to use this exercise, she has been doing so alongside the development of a “voice story” or “voice collage” (such as Rena Cook’s’ “voice house” [Cook, 2012] that allows the voice student to identify and name the productive influences, desires, people, places, and things that have shaped their voice(s) in important self-affirming ways as well. Naming the influences that have—for better or worse—“shaped who I am” vocally can allow a student to reckon with their emerging desires and where they want to go from here: which practices they want to preserve, affirm, or try, beyond putting single-point focus on the obstructive “what is in my way?” This redirects the conversation away from the binary “habitual vs. natural” patterning, or the overly simple emphasis on that which obstructs their legibility or clarity in relationship with a particular sort of audience. As Ocampo-Guzman points out, this indeed demands further clarity on the question of what are we training for: an industry as it currently exists with its demands on certain kinds of legibility, or one that can be intentionally transformed by affirming the full humanity of those who are currently training in its practices? Perhaps it’s possible to do both: wholly lifting up artists in their highly particular and nuanced “becoming” alongside further information about what expectations they might encounter in the industry as it currently exists.

For these practices to open up, we must look at how our methodology and pedagogy are in conversation with philosophy: how we conceptualize the voice can change how we engage with our classroom practices. To that end, it will be useful to think of voice itself as a developmental capability and a skill that is forged: not a skill in the sense of “the professional skill of voice production”—which has the potential to alienate, treating the voice as merely instrumental, mechanical, as wholly separate from a sense of self—but a human capacity that is developed according to social relationship. Voicing capability doesn’t happen alone (we don’t just “have a voice”, we learn to do voice, with and according to others), and making human sound is one way that we are rendered capable of connection, of getting needs met, of being in relationship. So, yes, a “skill,” but a skill that has a role to play in bringing ourselves more fully into being. It is a social accomplishment every step of the way—crying, grunting, laughing, “raspberries”, babbling, “a-goo,” and of course, speaking—and becomes more and more specifically deployed and responsive over time. To conceive of the voice as a capacity that is constantly in a state of development upends the narrative of voice that it must be rescued from necessarily pernicious influences of social power. 

And even though Linklater was ultimately clear that this process for her was not one in which one would ever fully “de-socialize” (the choice to speak/sound on free primary impulses must be conscious: the freedom lies in the choice itself ), the process of “re-socializing” the voice she describes (Bridel 2019) is still one that relies heavily on the assumption that one can choose only to recover a freedom that has been lost. In contrast, by connecting the skill of voice to the tools of self-construction, play, and invention, we allow more and more choice, creativity, and pleasure in the matter of its activation, while also undermining a dominant model of the most authentic self as pre-social, pre-political, and ideally self-defined. 

Micha Espinosa discusses the activity of developing a positive “vocal aesthetic”: 

The voice teachers all agreed on the benefits of a clear tone and a healthy instrument. But one of the voice teachers, a non-native English speaker, liked a voice with a little dirt in it. A voice that sounded like it had life. Maybe that life was hard? Maybe that voice had imperfections? (Espinosa, 2011)

The “dirt” in the voice here (the sound that reflects the stuff of our lives, even its injustices) is a way of resisting erasure, and also performs a resistance to closure that Foucault’s work also suggests. There is no simple “freedom” or “liberation” here in a universal sense, just the particularities of a voice in its complex becoming.

The ability to respond to the ongoing question—“what does freedom feel like for me? What is my emerging vocal aesthetic?” ensures a permanent stance of skepticism that continually opens up frontiers of knowledge about the methods we employ. It demands that we ask, “what if freedom could also look like this? and “Is a universal conceptualization of freedom yet another way to send certain voices into hiding?” As Ocampo-Guzman stated at the aforementioned panel, international and cross-cultural conceptualizations of personal freedom vary widely and carry with it wildly differing political and social aims, projects, and hazards. A persistent stance of skepticism can continually challenge an overly simple binary: free/socialized, natural/habitual, open/closed, presence/absence. And perhaps seemingly simple classroom revelations such as “now your jaw just freed up” can be made more appropriately complex by asking “but was there an unspoken expectation of vulnerability in the room?” Did that energetic release of voice happen but under emotional duress or pressure to “have a breakthrough” that may have momentary benefits but compromised the student’s overall sense of agency? Was that tangible vocal shift happening in the ballpark of a vocal gift freely given? 

There is so much more to be explored here about the contingency of consent, personal agency in the voice classroom, and the empowerment of boundary practice techniques (such as those developed by Theatrical Intimacy Education’s frameworks), that falls beyond the purview of this response. However, we believe that these questions must remain central to a radical, engaged training pedagogy. As one of the founders of critical pedagogy, Henry Giroux rightly points out, “it is crucial to recognize that pedagogy has less to do with the language of technique and methodology than it does with issues of politics and power” (Giroux 2020, 81). Theatrical voice training will always be implicated in power and cultural politics, and as such, can be reframed as a way to actively construct “representations of ourselves and others, and our … environment” (81) in each moment, as classroom practice: these representations are at the very heart of the matter for future theater-makers and the gifts they might choose to give.

Citations

Bridel, David. Spotlight@SDA, “Kristin Linklater in Conversation with David Bridel and Natsuko Ohama.” Video, 2019). USC School of Dramatic Arts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ut8Mk0DpEuE

Clemitshaw, Gary. “Critical Pedagogy as Educational Resistance: a post-structuralist reflection.” Power and Education 5:3 (2013) 268–79. 

Cook, Rena. Voice and the Young Actor. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. 

Espinosa, Micha. “A Call to Action: Embracing the Cultural Voice or Taming the Wild Tongue.” Voice and Speech Review, 7:1 (2011) 75–86. 

Giroux, Henry. On Critical Pedagogy. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.

Jack Leff is correct to bring our attention to the matter of technology, and how various technologies interact with human vocalizations, always in the context of interlocking systems of political meaning and social inequality. As part of our response to his essay, we would like to continue his generative analysis of the politics of the megaphone and microphone, as sites and mechanisms of both vocal injustice and potential resistance to such injustice. Leff is careful to point out that these political meanings associated with various technologies, including the megaphone and the microphone, are not necessary associations. Obviously, megaphones can be used for oppressive purposes, and microphones can be used to forward various forms of justice and flourishing. And so before we do a deeper dive into the use of these two technologies in the examples of specifically political discourse used in Leff’s response (protests, speeches by elected officials, campaign events, etc.), we first want to trouble in more detail the association of megaphones with political resistance and microphones with state power. We then conclude our response with a consideration of Leff’s concern that identifying a figure such as Hilary Clinton as a target of vocal injustice risks masking the harms she imposed as a powerful political figure. 

Perhaps most obviously, rallies and speeches of all political stripes (Pride, March for Our Lives, BLM March on Washington), rely heavily on the mic (and, gesturally, perhaps even “the mic drop”). The microphone in these cases require a platform, prestige, and positional power, but does not necessarily imply “transphobic/racist/sexist pundits,” and the power that they invoke and deploy is often explicitly framed as counter to state or cultural power. Such framing, of course, needs to be examined critically, as it can all too easily be accompanied by an articulation of the right to oppress others. That is, some political movements are calls for greater degrees of oppression by the state, or even an overthrowing of the current state apparatus in favor of one that is more oppressive.

In fact, recent events have provided an example of the use of the megaphone in precisely such a political context. The “Bullhorn Lady” during the January 6th assault on the Capitol was apparently providing the rioters critical information about where to go once they had breached the building. As we will discuss in more detail below, the very use of the megaphone made identifying the “Bullhorn Lady” more challenging, although once the video was distributed widely, social media users were able to do so effectively. The point here is that the megaphone was here used as a form of insurrection and violent protest that, while ostensibly critical of the current state, actually was in favor of an intensification of state power against certain social groups. 

Moreover, raising the question of the politics of technologies of sound does not, we hold, support the claim that the microphone is indeed an elite instrument in 2022: 85 percent of Americans own a smartphone and therefore a way to record (and virtually amplify) sounds on the internet, social media, and so on. Such capacities are arguably far more present and influential than the use of the microphone in the context of a particular gathered crowd. In some ways, the harkening to megaphones feels nostalgic, as if the gathering of crowds in person is more present or potent than the circulation of content online.

Though not explicitly a site of political discourse, the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial (and result favoring Depp, over which Republicans are “doing backflips” [Bort 2022]) is politicized in the media backlash against the #MeToo movement. A courtroom microphone loomed in nearly every shot of the trial, and Amber Heard’s voice was captured and amplified significantly—her testimony was recorded, distributed, re-mixed, and mocked all over the internet, out of real time and often out of context. To speak to the issue of scale, “The audio of Heard testifying to her abuse at the trial in Fairvax, Virginia…is currently going viral on TikTok, with nearly 15,000 videos using the sound. Most disturbingly, the top videos under the sound—many of which have more than 10 million views—appear to be literal reenactments of the abuse Heard describes in her testimony” (Dickson 2022). Popular TikTok videos mock her vocality and emotionality as performative (and therefore untrustworthy) or substitute children’s gibberish with titles like “what I hear when Amber talks.” The point is, the microphone here becomes an easy agent for the scalability of misogyny, but not because it endows the speaker with political power or prestige: quite the opposite. The amplification into social media mainstream in this case repackages and reframes the audio track of a speaker’s words—picked up by a mic—in such a way to subvert the speaker or render their words suspicious, silly, dismissible, morally bankrupt, etc.

The context of the public speech matters, and the way the mic is used matters (whether for amplification or recording, or both) and how that audio material is circulated matters. Similarly, how the accomplishments of the voice behind the megaphone—the building of energy, the call/response, the sending of a political message—live on depends upon how those voices are recorded, edited, and re-amplified. Surely, then, we want to distinguish and understand what it means to experience voices together (as choir) in contrast with experiencing them through the internet and social media/tion. I suspect that Leff had Trump’s voice on repeat in part at least because of media repetition of sound bytes after the fact rather than the amplification (via microphone) “in the original moment.” And what can be done to re-purpose technology for resistance online in the building up of or dismantling of cultural narratives? When our own bodies are vulnerable, present in spaces together, and/or at risk, how are the words we hear then landing on us, perhaps prompting us to a vocal response ourselves? How different than when we are hearing voices through earbuds, alone, looking at a smartphone, typing up a comment or inserting an emoji; and yet can this also be a site of resistance? 

The Individual Voice And/In the Crowd

Although we find value in challenging the too easy association of the megaphone with valuable political opposition and the microphone with the perpetuation of oppressive social and political structures, nevertheless the specific political sites whose sonorous elements Leff analyzes warrant further attention. Leff mentions that the megaphone, a familiar apparatus at many public protests, has a distortive quality that transforms, often beyond recognition, the sonorous quality of the speaker’s voice. This capacity, as Leff notes, renders the megaphone a transgressive vocal site, one that can, at least at times, push back against state forces, particularly those most directly related to incarceration, by rendering the speaker difficult to identify (the Bullhorn Lady is such an example, as we’ve mentioned). We seek to add to this compelling analysis by noting how the sound generated by megaphones is accompanied by certain visual effects generated by the shape, size, and placement of the megaphone, effects that not only shape the political meaning of the sounds being generated, but, as it turns out, provide further critique of Adriana Cavarero’s theory of vocal justice. 

We argue in our book that vocalizations not only always take place in social and political contexts, but that the reception of such vocalizations is a multisensory affair. How and what we hear is profoundly shaped by how and what we are seeing, feeling, smelling, and tasting. Interestingly, the sonorous masking that megaphones accomplish is also accompanied by a partial visual masking: using a megaphone frequently hides significant portions of the speaker’s face from even nearby members of the crowd. And if the crowd is a large one (without the financial resources to provide projected videos of the events), many members of it are receiving the voice without an image of the face of the person who is speaking. The megaphone, then, often makes the speaker’s face, the body part most closely associated with personal identity.

This is not to say, however, that the vocalization is received in the absence of any visual sense data at all—to the contrary, sighted members of the crowd may be hearing the voice amplified by the megaphone while viewing many, many other people, as well as the surrounding environment. Here, we’d like to focus on the other members of the crowd (although both built and found aspects of the environment are also playing important roles in the megaphone’s capacity to amplify well and clearly). Leff’s point has helped us to identify another way in which Cavarero’s privileging of the voice’s uniqueness—how well, if not perfectly, it can be used to identify individuals, a trait upon which she seeks to model a form of political engagement, as well as improved (and maybe not new) ways of philosophizing—is limited. 

We critique Cavarero’s approach to vocal justice at some length in the book, and so will not reproduce those arguments here. We will add to them, however, by affirming Leff’s point that masking the identity of the megaphone user can be a crucial tool of political protest. Yet we think the megaphone does, or can do, even more than this. Although there are exceptions to this rule, the use of the megaphone in the context of public (usually outdoor) political protest is understood as not simply amplifying the individual opinion of the speaker. Members of a protest do not listen to the voice amplified by the megaphone to discover the individual or novel opinions of the speaker; instead (again, not universally, but frequently) the person wielding the megaphone has the responsibility of articulating the shared, collective critique and outrage that brought the group together in the first place (and so, seeing the face behind the megaphone is neither easy to do nor important). And so it is appropriate that the amplified voice should register sonically as a representative of a gathered social group. Or, perhaps even more powerfully, the megaphone is deployed not to reveal that which already exists as commonly held views, but to generate new, shared views. Whether it is a matter of representation or generation, what is needed, sometimes, when speaking truth to power, is a voice whose sonorous qualities do not emphasize uniqueness, but shared political positionalities—and demands. 

The microphone, by contrast, is frequently (although, as we mentioned earlier, not exclusively) used in indoor contexts, and for the purposes of allowing an individual person’s vocalizations be shared with a group who, by and large, has gathered to hear what that particular person is going to say. The crowd may be friendly, or hostile; it may be eager to hear certain themes or refrains, and may roar with approval at ideas that they share; but even if the, say, elected official is explicitly presenting themselves as representative of or identified with the gathered crowd, nevertheless, the crowd has come to hear that particular individual (the headliner!). All of which is to say: microphones can confer or intensify vocal privilege to individuals as individuals, endowing those with access to them with political and social importance while simultaneously further establishing the value of their unique contributions to whatever discourse is underway (and indeed, this is one reason that it’s not just Trump’s horrific ideas that haunt Leff and far too many of us—the distinctive sound of his voice has been hammered into our consciousness, and, we would argue, is one of the factors that draw so many people to his events: they get to hear those things said in that voice). As we’ve argued above, microphones don’t accomplish such tasks necessarily. But when used in this way, the technology puts to work the very characteristic that Cavarero privileges with regard to voice—its uniqueness, its identifiability—to solidify the very power dynamics that the megaphone, in its strikingly different relationship to group identity and positionality, is sometimes better able to disrupt.

Hillary Clinton’s (Sonic) Sphere of Influence

We also want to address, albeit briefly, the points that Leff makes regarding Hillary Clinton’s voice, which in our book shows up as a site of gender inequality insofar as it is and was the target of a disproportionate amount of vocal disciplining, at least when compared to her male identified political counterparts. Leff notes that while we are correct to identify the sexism of such disciplining, putting forth Clinton as an example of a target of unjust vocal politics risks effacing the significant vocal privilege that she enjoys, particular with regard to the degree to which her ideas and decisions (ideas and decisions that, to a significant degree, perpetuate harmful systemic injustices) are amplified and valued. There is a question of scope here, Leff argues, by which we take him to mean that the vocal injustices that Clinton has experienced are dwarfed by the injustices, vocal and otherwise, imposed on marginalized social groups—injustices, again, for which the political elite, of which Clinton is a member, bear a disproportionate responsibility.

We take Leff’s point, and hope, perhaps too optimistically, that the many discussions in the book of various types of vocal injustice ensure that the Clinton example does not succeed in effacing the broad and deep effects of vocal injustice on queer, immigrant, and disabled bodies, just to name a few. We also do want to defend the value of, at least sometimes, separating sonorous politics from linguistic or ideological politics. That is, we notice that Leff’s discussion of Clinton’s voice quickly slips into the metaphorical (his references to how her voice has supported imperialism, for example, uses “voice” as a stand-in for political power). We quite intentionally sought to keep some distance between what Clinton was saying in these examples, and the political positions that she has forwarded, to bring to the fore the politics of her vocal sounds. In doing so, we remain convinced that how Clinton’s voice is treated on the political stage can illuminate important forms of vocal gender inequality. Yet Leff’s point holds, at least to a degree; any illumination, after all, casts other areas into shadow, and when the individual whose experiences are being illuminated is as privileged as Clinton is, the swaths of human experience being cast into shadow can be wide indeed.

The point here might be taken that so often a discussion of ethics orients us towards how tone-policing distracts the conversation away from a speaker’s content (MacLachlan 2022). Though we claim that Leff is eclipsing the distinction between voice as metaphor and voice as sound, he does draw our attention to the fact that a discussion concentrating so much focus on the way Clinton’s vocal tone was criticized could distract from a meaningful discussion about the content of her character, politics, and career. That would somewhat lie outside of our pursuit, however, as we are seeking to listen to how voices are disciplined and policed sonically. Yes, she has been given the mic over and over, and we might have other issues with her politics or use of power; yet the suspicion of her character hinged, in part, on a particular patriarchal listening ear’s insistence on hearing her voice itself as irritating, annoying, grating, insincere, and shrill, qualities that were resolutely and profoundly inextricable from her gender identity. These qualities were also amplified due to the “mic effect”—using more vocal force than necessary (compensatory volume) into the mic in an attempt to walk the precarious line between being compelling (perhaps even passionate) and being an over-emotional harpy. 

We are also interested in Clinton’s use of a strategy to limit her sonic sphere of influence by using a noise machine to keep journalists from hearing a particular fundraising speech.  The use of scale here aimed to silence her own voice in a very specific way: keeping her voice semi-private to protect her speech from critique. The reporters did, of course, have recording devices of their own which subverted her attempt and captured both the speech and the strategy of sonic limitation itself.

We do not seek to legitimize concerns of sexism at the expense of a criticism of her politics and (mis)use of power/platform. However, that platform was the setting for this particular set of criticisms about her voice, and the media’s (esp. right wing media’s) use of scale in re-framing the conversation about her eligibility for office in part around her voice (as a further justification for disliking her politics) is what we are particularly bringing attention to here.

Citations

Bort, Ryan. “Republicans Are Doing Backflips Over Johnny Depp Winning His Defamation Case.” Rolling Stone, June 1, 2022. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/johnny-depp-defamation-verdict-republican-response-1361542/

Dickson, EJ. “‘Demoralizing and Demeaning’: A Gross TikTok Trend Mocking Amber Heard is Going Viral.” Rolling Stone, May 9, 2022. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/amber-heard-johnny-depp-tiktok-trend-mocking-testimony-1350584/

MacLachlan, Alice. “Tone-Policing and the Assertion of Authority.” APA Blog: Women in Philosophy, May 22, 2022. https://blog.apaonline.org/2022/05/10/tone-policing-and-the-assertion-of-authority/.