Sounding Bodies
By
3.21.23 |
Symposium Introduction
I turned to sound studies as a resource for teaching, several years ago, when my teaching practices were beginning to seem stale. Sound studies, especially at the intersections with critical disability studies and feminist philosophy, quite quickly turned the staleness into a whole array of creative problems to work with.
On the one hand, for example, sound studies scholars like Nina Sun Eidsheim flag the ways in which our habits of perception can keep intact those systems of oppression that our critical pedagogies seek to undo. We hear a sound and swiftly ask a disciplining question, one that Eidsheim calls the “acousmatic question”: who made that sound? Instead of responding to sounds with this question, Eidsheim suggests, we can examine our own enculturated and experience-based perceptions: what do my listening habits demonstrate about my assumptions and the habitual ways in which I “hear” and adjudicate sounds?1
This interplay between sounds and listening underscores the kinds of reflections that crip theorists solicit. Margaret Price asks, for example, how a shared space like a classroom might afford different experiences, pointing out that “not all of us, in academia, are inhabiting the same spacetime.”2 Along similar lines, in a contribution to this symposium, Joshua St. Pierre points to intervocality—a key conceptual contribution of Sounding Bodies—as an event, produced by capacities of speakers as well as listeners that, in any given situation, will shape exchanges in particular ways. Even staleness, as a quality of teaching-practice, starts to signal the in-betweenness of teaching and learning, opening up the relationality of specific classroom encounters.
On the other hand, by attending to listening habits, we can think concretely about the constraints of listening itself. As Jill Stauffer suggests, you can “open yourself to surprise to the sometimes unwelcome sense that you do not already have at hand the tools you need for hearing and responding.”3 This point collides, somewhat, with my motivation to tap the liveliness of sound studies for crafting courses and delivering lessons. How do we know what we don’t know when it comes to our “tools” by which knowledge comes to count as knowledge? As Ann Cahill and Christine Hamel explain in Sounding Bodies, “who gets to speak, how frequently, and for how long” are prompts that open up the sonic terms by which spaces, like classrooms, come to hold claims to authority (162), so much so that mechanics of oppression emerge as salient to the material aspects of speaking and listening (3, 16–21).
This brings me to a third lesson of sound studies, one that runs throughout Sounding Bodies, and this symposium as a whole. I have been stopped in my tracks by statements like this one by Billy-Ray Belcourt. “To my mind,” Belcourt writes in A History of My Brief Body, “one of the most vital modalities of decolonial life is that of remaining unaddressable to a settler public that feasts on our misery.” And then, with barely a beat, Belcourt continues, “Most of the time writing a book seems incompatible with this.”4
In my own classes, this tiny beat is where we settle into conversation as a class, sharing musings from our positions around the room about the impasse that Belcourt is flagging here. “What is the incompatibility that Belcourt is identifying?” I ask, as we reflect on the conditions by which a settler professor has assigned a book that contains passages like this one. There is no acousmatic question to pose when a sound or a text shifts the terms by which it might be audible or legible to others. Rather, conditions of reading and discussing themselves emerge as problems. As Margaret Kemp puts it, in the first response of this symposium, there is an archive and also a container to the modes by which we read, choose texts for students to read, and engage with others through reading, writing, and conversation. “What is the container designed to hold?” Kemp asks. “Who made the container? What does the container exclude?”
These questions draw us into the exchanges that make up this symposium, and they also get to the heart of the project of Sounding Bodies. Cast as a container, our disciplines form us into the kinds of teachers who presume we know what “counts” as teaching and learning. We become shaped into some version of a gatekeeper, assigning texts from specific archives and producing texts in turn. This is one reason for my own enthusiastic response to Cahill and Hamel’s co-written book, especially in terms of its creative and transdisciplinary willingness to rethink the forms of disciplines themselves: its sustained focus on the forms and practices by which training occurs, from professional theatre and voice settings to our various institutional classrooms, brings the sonic aspects of these sites to life, as well as their ethical and political stakes.
Bringing feminist philosophy and theatre studies together, Sounding Bodies engages sound and sound studies in order to think through concrete somatic practices—like voice and the pedagogies by which voices get trained; like ears and the import of how listening practices take place; like soundscapes and the interplay between voices, hearing, and systemic modes of injustice. As Antonio Ocampo-Guzman’s response makes clear, the disciplining work that makes up voice-training is, itself, a matter of impassioned and particular vocational discipline: investing in a teacher like Kristin Linklater brings along with it a set of epistemological and somatic practices. Ocampo-Guzman captures the stakes of the feedback loops between one’s own training and the practices by which one goes on to train others. These stakes take on the valence of existential commitments, given how fully these practices can shape the terrain of what counts as teaching and learning, and, indeed, what gets excluded as meaningful forms of engagement.
What rarely happens, when it comes to exchanges about pedagogy or teacher-training, is what unfolds in Cahill and Hamel’s response to Kemp: a naming of how disorienting it can seem to feel unaddressed, at least in terms of one’s expectations about an exchange. Teachers, whether in the classroom or in a professional setting like a symposium, are not often hailed into this kind of vulnerability. And so another reason for how much I enjoy and will enjoy teaching Sounding Bodies has to do with this openness in the book itself to difficulty, disorientation, even impasse. Where Ocampo-Guzman brings us to the affective terrain of dedication, even devotion, to a pedagogical practice, Kemp shares how it felt, somatically and epistemologically, to inhabit a classroom-space as a student whose voice was not hailed, and whose insights required other tools or containers that are not available. Through this first-person reflection, Kemp shifts the terms of exchange, as Cahill and Hamel fully enter into questions about invitation, exclusion, and even silence.
In turn, Jack Leff, in the fourth response in this symposium, directs our attention to many other forms of container at play in sonic scenarios: the microphones that amplify a speaker’s voice, for example, and the affective valences by which speech or silence generate meanings not reducible to the contents of a declaration. Leff then turns to an example of dissonance—a megaphone, put to use by activists inhabiting public spaces in resistance to state-powers. Bringing feminist science and technology studies into the conversation, Leff’s response works beautifully alongside that of St. Pierre’s. (For readers who might assign this symposium to students, my suggestion is to pair Kemp and Ocampo-Guzman’s responses, so richly inflected with queries about pedagogy and training, and then to pair St. Pierre and Kemp’s responses, which turn the focus towards the materialist systems of (dis)ability and technology).
As St. Pierre notes in the second response, Sounding Bodies is a book that expansively and persuasively examines problems that have preoccupied many of us for a long time—and, indeed, St. Pierre’s own new book, Cheap Talk: Disability and the Politics of Communication, is the focus of a forthcoming Syndicate symposium. As a feminist project, Sounding Bodies models a generosity of prose—with first-person stories and collaboratively written analyses—that many readers will find engaging and exemplary. By turning feminist philosophy itself into a practice, a mode to scrutinize and reflect upon, Cahill and Hamel provide those of us in philosophy, in particular, a deeply promising way to confront our own practices, from teaching to everyday interactions.
Nina Sun Eidsheim, The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 24.↩
Margaret Price, “Time Harms: Disabled Faculty Navigating the Accommodations Loop,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 2(2021): 263.↩
Jill Stauffer, Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Bering Heard (New York: Columbia, 2018), 69.↩
Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body (Toronto: Penguin Random House, 2021), 95-6.↩
3.28.23 |
Response
The Ethics of Envoicing and Respiratory Care
I confess a selfish thought that kept turning the pages of this incredible book: my past decade of work would have been far easier with it in hand. In 2012, critical literature on stuttering was scant and the idea of dysfluency studies was just starting to bud (in both activist and scholarly circles). The discursive territory of the stuttering voice had been dominated by scientific-medical experts who specialize in reductionism. I hated my voice growing up because of the injustice that clung to it, and what could the Speech-Language Pathologists who register vocal injustice as sad but inevitable outcomes of pathology offer in redress but condolence paired with techniques to fix my voice and my self-esteem?
Over the past ten or so years, dysfluency studies and activism have worked to contest this hegemony claimed over the stuttering voice. My own part of this work began in 2012 as a new graduate student with a hunch that stuttering was (without using the term) intervocal, a shared event produced by the capacities of both speakers and listeners. Cahill and Hamel cite this line: “What if we saw stuttering as constructed by a hearer prejudiced against ‘broken’ speech as well as its speaker, and thus as a product of ableism?” (St. Pierre 2012, 6). But without a robust theory of intervocality to draw from—and thus, a sufficient theory of vocal injustice and ethics—I have made due trying to cobble hunches together with bits of phenomenology (e.g. Merleau-Ponty and Iris Marion Young), critical theory (e.g. Foucault, Deleuze, and various neo-Marxists), and crip theory (e.g. Margrit Shildrick and Robert McRuer).
This is all to say that reading Sounding Bodies felt like someone connecting pieces of a familiar puzzle, one I even contributed a small part in making, but could not quite put together. The collaboration of Cahill and Hamel—of philosophy and voice studies—provides the footing necessary to stay with the trouble when the voice leaks past disciplinary boundaries. It is one thing to claim stuttering is shared; quite another to provide a theory of intervocality that can articulate “the ways in which voiced human beings are responsible for each other’s voices, individually and collectively, sonorously and politically” (64). What makes their argument that the voice is ontologically relational rather than “a set of capacities generated within and primarily exercised by a self-contained, autonomous person” (26) so compelling is that the argument does not exclude, oppose, or even set in tension the materiality of the voice from its political and the ethical aspects. Cahill and Hamel’s articulations of “vocal injustice” and the “ethics of envoicing” flow directly from the facticity of the sonorous voice, from the fact that voice cannot be pinned to an original, individual source.
Attention to intervocality thus opens a world of radical interdependency, and I was struck while reading by the resonance between intervocality, dysfluency studies, and crip theory more generally. There is so much resonance that for the sake of this piece, I will restrict my comments to just a small passage. That is to say, perhaps the most striking connection was about human breath. Cahill and Hamel write:
On a fundamental level . . . part of the ethics of envocicing is a recognition of respiratory responsibility, a sense that precisely because no one individual body can fully control or determine the content of the air that the body takes in, or the flow of the air in the inhabited space, we all bear collective responsibility for each other’s breath. . . . Moreover, respiratory responsibility extends beyond the responsibility for the content of the breathed air to responsibility for social and economic situations that preclude or forward access to stress-free, easy breathing (67).
Breath is the primal ground of human voice, yet access to easy-breathing is distributed unevenly across social, economic, and political contexts. Whose breath has to be stifled for others to breathe comfortably in social contexts? Or, to use Cahill and Hamel’s example, Eric Gardner’s dying plea “I can’t breathe” indicts us all in different ways when we bear collective responsibility for each other’s breath. As in the above paragraph, the sense of responsibility that emerges from Cahill and Hamel is not duty-based, but rather is an ethos that groundswells from the shared act of, here, metabolizing oxygen. To be responsible is to become responsive to the contingencies of the moment that continually recreate “the possibilities for intelligibility, recognition, and communication” (66).
In addition to respiratory responsibility, it also makes sense to speak of “respiratory governance”—that is, the host of techniques applied to the human subject to maximize the calculability and thus efficiency of human breath. Danielle Peers writes in “From Inhalation to Inspiration: A Genealogical Auto-ethnography of a Supercrip,” that “[my coaches] subject[ed] me to repetitive disciplinary practices that shaped my breath into increasingly athletically useful and efficient forms. They helped to mold me into the kind of person who would continuously monitor, discipline, and use breathing toward increasingly athletic ends” (2015, 333). Maintaining the identity of a “supercrip” depends upon the uninterrupted performance of non-laboured breathing, such that any lapse, any gasping for air, risks the supercrip being exposed as a faker and fraud.
I was never a Paralympian athlete, but my respiratory capacities as a stutterer were also caught in a matrix of disciplinary techniques. For as long as Speech-Language Pathology has existed as a discipline (cf. St. Pierre and St. Pierre 2018), easy-breathing exercises have been mobilized to induce easy-sounding vocalizations. As a UK based group explains, “Breathing exercises are commonly used in speech and language therapy for individuals who have difficulties with the volume of their voice and those who find it difficult to sequence and coordinate breathing, voice and articulation in order to gain effective speech” (SLT, 2022). Through a repetition of disciplinary practices, SLPs helped mold me into a kind of person who used slow and easy breathing to achieve fluent (i.e. acceptable) communication. I have early memories of an SLP shaming me for vocal fry and explaining that I could sound normal if I could control my breathing. That stutterers find their breath shortened or stopped during conversation is made to be a problem of the individual body that requires therapeutic intervention, rather than the problem of the unequal sharing of respiratory goods.
For both Peers and myself, like many other marginalized peoples, acceptance into the social world depended upon a mastery of disciplinary norms that turn breath into resource and breathing into technique. For many members of disability communities during COVID, masks and ventilators have risen to the forefront of this struggle. But, returning to Cahill and Hamel, respiratory governance does not have the final word. One way to extend the idea of “individual and collective responsibility for the air that fills our own and other’s lungs” (81) is through what Peers and Lindsay Eales call a crip ethic of collective care (Peers and Eales 2017). For a certain period in their life—during their fall from supercripdom—Peers depended upon the labour of other people to manually inflate and deflate their lungs. I suggest this exemplifies, in quite a dramatic way, the movement from respiratory governance to a form of respiratory interdependence. Peers writes:
Pressurized oxygen scorches my lungs for the first time: dry bursts burning relief into thirsty tissue and tired muscle. The exhalation is then squeezed out of me by the hands of a caring respiratory therapist. My skin shifts from the blue-white hue of oxygen deprivation to the distinctly red hue of shame. With that stale, mucus-filled, first dependent breath, I begin my voyage as a sickly, revolting gimp. (2015, 340).
Over time, the shame that resides in medicalized dependency was transformed by Peers and their community into something quite different: a practice of co-breathing as a mode of radical, collaborative care. Below is a transliteration from a later article of a crip dance performance by Peers and their partner Lindsay Eales:
Lindsay rolls to kneeling behind Danielle-on-mat, palm them with one hand on either side and wraps her fingers to lace between Danielle’s ribs. Lindsay and Danielle meld into a collective breathing sculpture, collectively directing time through inhalation. Palms squeezing exhalation to an audible wheeze from Danielle’s lips. The audience fuses with this breathing assemblage, casting heat, warmth, and silence over this intimate scene, painting Lindsay and Danielle’s cheeks with a faint blush (Peers and Eales 2017, 119).
The difference is notable: from the red hue of shame to the faint blush of intimacy. Eales and Peers together form a breathing assemblage held together by desire and mutual responsiveness rather than pre-assigned roles (expert and gimp) that are mediated by technological devices. It follows that while the medicalized breathing assemblage tries to mete out respiratory responsibility, they are indifferent to its own becoming and thus have no capacity to direct the becoming of time. Put otherwise, a breathing assemblage cast with collective care and radical interdependency is attuned to what William Connolly calls the “dissonant conjunction of the moment” where “the pressures of the past enter into a dissonant conjunction with the uncertain possibilities of the future” (2002, 145). While crip assemblages like collective breathing sculptures seek out such “rifts in time,” ableist practices suppress the dissonance and the new/uncertain/creative possibilities of the future. Without an ethos of collective care (closely related to what Cahill and Hamel term “respiratory generosity” [81]), breathing assemblages are prone to collapse into a set of techniques of respiratory governance that function only to metabolize the past.
A final thought down this rabbit hole. Cahill and Hamel argue compellingly that “[o]ne’s capacity to breathe, right to breathe, and quality of breath are in a constant state of material becoming” (66). Bruno Latour would agree and add a slight twist:
Are we “in” the atmosphere? Not really, since this dangerous poison is itself the unforeseen consequence of the action of micro-organisms that have given to other
actors–from which we descend–the opportunity to develop. In other words, we are the atmosphere. Oxygen is a relative newcomer, a massive case of pollution that was grasped by new forms of life as a golden opportunity, after it had annihilated billions of earlier
forms of life (2017, 105).
We are the atmosphere insofar it has developed and exists through the actions of oxygen-metabolizing organisms. Breathable air is likewise not the background for human action that can be taken for granted, it is human action. This adds additional weight to Cahill and Hamel’s point that “the possibilities for intelligibility, recognition, and communication are continually recreated” and that we bear collective responsibility for these material possibilities.
Bibliography
Cahill, Ann J. and Christine Hamel. Sounding Bodies: Identity, Injustice, and the Voice. New York: Methuen Drama, 2022.
Connolly, William E. Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2002.
Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Translated by Catherine Porter. Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2017.
Peers, Danielle. “From inhalation to inspiration: A genealogical auto-ethnography of a supercrip.” In Foucault and the government of disability, edited by S. Tremain, 331–49. 2nd edition. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015.
Peers, Danielle and Lindsay Eales. “Moving Materiality: People, Tools, & This Thing Called Disability.” Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal, 2.2 (2017): 101–25.
SLT. 2022. “Breathing Exercises.” SLT. https://www.slt.co.uk/speech-language-and-communication/one-to-one-therapy/breathing-exercises/. Accessed March 16, 2022.
St. Pierre, Joshua. “The Construction of the Disabled Speaker: Locating Stuttering in Disability Studies.” The Canadian Journal of Disability Studies 1.3 (2012): 1-21.
St. Pierre, Joshua and Charis St. Pierre. “Governing the Voice: A Critical History of Speech-Language Pathology.” Foucault Studies 24 (2018): 151–84.
4.4.23 |
Response
Disoriented On the Rackety Bridge
It is in the attempt to walk (and live) on the rackety bridge between self and other —and not on the attempt to arrive at one side or another—that we discover real hope.
Jill Dolan
I have been unstable on my feet ever since the first publication of the adaptation I did of Kristin Linklater’s Freeing the Natural Voice into Spanish in 2010. My own personal experience as an actor trained in this methodology and as a teacher trained by Linklater has been played out in the disorienting arena of my two languages. I have attempted to reflect on my bilingual experience on several occasions—papers, essays, and many conversations—yet nothing had prepared me for the profound complications that reading Sounding Bodies has presented. What follows is another attempt at using the written words of my second language to either hold on to the rackety bridge, or to simply fall in the turbulent waters below.
This was a very difficult book to read, and a very important one. The difficulty laid not so much in the academic language embedded in it, but more in the deep examination of a pedagogy that I have subscribed to for the last thirty years and on which I have built my professional life. However, I have had deep respect and admiration for Christine Hamel for years and have cherished the many conversations we have had about voice and acting pedagogy. I am grateful for the opportunity to reconsider the very foundations of Freeing the Natural Voice, though I must say that doing this in the aftermath of Linklater’s death is even more complex.
These last two years have been dramatic indeed for those of us in this profession, and this book could not have been timelier, however disconcerting it is. The COVID-19 pandemic and the social and racial justice reckoning that impacts both the professional and academic theatres must call us to reconsider the very purpose of training voices and the methods and pedagogies we subscribe to accomplish that purpose.
Cahill and Hamel’s “tracing of the evolution of voice training from the exclusionary approaches of the mid-twentieth century to the neutrality approaches giving way again to the multicultural and culturally sensitive approaches” (134) has been extremely helpful. Much makes sense to me when I consider Linklater’s work as part of the ‘natural/free’ approaches to voice training perspective borne out of the 1960s because it also includes most of the theatre training that I have received in Colombia, England, Canada, and the United States. It also resonates with the spirit of “liberation theology” and Paulo Freire’s “Education towards Freedom” both of which have had direct influence on how I view my work and my life.
I remember talking with Kristin about her own immigrant journey into the US—she arrived in New York City in November 1963, a few weeks before the assassination of President Kennedy. She took full advantage of all that was available in NYC in that decade—from psychotherapy to somatic-based therapies, the Alexander Technique—she even taught workshops along Moshe Feldenkrais—to women’s liberation and the sexual revolution. A few years later, Kristin and several other founding members of Shakespeare & Company participated in what was then called the EST Training. Many of the training exercises that I learned through Kristin and at Shakespeare & Company have that same basic purpose: to bring the “Self” into full action in our breath, in our voice, in our presence and in our playing on the stage.
However, Cahill and Hamel rightly call me to reconsider much of that pedagogy when they write we must become “increasingly conscious of the ways in which we might unwittingly perpetuate oppressions and privilege dominant norms of experience in the name of “empowering voices” (155). I must agree that some of those methodologies need to be stopped because it can be damaging to our students; at the very least, they can be inappropriately invasive of a student’s private life. They can certainly be extremely manipulative.
After reading Sounding Bodies, I need to consider how I present myself in the room as the teacher with years of disciplinary experience while at the same time respecting each student’s experience in their bodies and in their lives. Most of my work has been centered on teaching theatre in academic institutions, which pose a complicated paradox: I am deemed the expert in the field which the university has contracted to deliver the course; the student is paying the university for that course and assumes that I know better. However, this transactional structure does not fit in well with the desire to establish a more relational interaction with the student and their study of their voice. Many of us have been, if not damaged, then at least hurt by egocentric teachers that insist that they know better and meddle into our private emotional lives in predatory ways, in the name of seeking an “authentic breakthrough.” I believe Kristin struggled with this and most of the time her deep sense of humanity found a best way forward. But not always. I have certainly struggled with it myself as a teacher, and I am now attempting to recalibrate my teaching into a place of allowing the student to have their own experience without too much meddling. In so doing, I aspire to heed Cahill and Hamel’s call “to deliver the wisdom of pragmatism over to a deeper understanding of the latest traditions and ideological assumptions baked into our practices” as an ethical mandate (133).
Cahill and Hamel’s invite us to consider “a new model of liberation which frees the self (and voice) from unhelpful or unwanted identity scripts no longer looks like finding the “natural/real” self, but is instead an embracing of one’s identify (and identity per se) as constructed so that one may take a more active role in its production” (143). These are some of the ways in which I’m currently adjusting in the studio: first, I’m being mindful of the use of the word ‘relaxation’ which may be very helpful for some and yet, might be extremely unhelpful to others. I am quickly learning about trauma-informed pedagogy and understanding that helping a student to bring awareness and recognition might be more respectful as well as useful. As Hamel writes, “Awareness and recognition are more fundamental to relaxation that the pointed directive of ‘letting go’ or ‘allowing release itself’” (150). Secondly, I am more careful with the invitation to ‘close your eyes’ which again may be triggering to some, and exclusionary for other students in the studio. Lastly, I am not using any prescribed gender specific pitches on the piano to invite students to explore resonance and rather, guiding the students through as much range as they are able and willing to explore. I would welcome an opportunity to witness Hamel teaching in her studio, and witnessing how she resolves these issues in a practical way.
These are a few examples of my attempt to grapple with the notion of ‘freeing the natural’ voice. For many years I have used that term without examination, and certainly with a clear sense that it referred to the voice prior to socialization. Cahill and Hamel question this in a profound way writing that “social forces don’t act on authentic selves as much as they create the conditions of possibility under which selves emerge in their particularity” (47). I need to study the theoretical frameworks presented in Sounding Bodies much more deeply to achieve a clearer understanding of what Cahill and Hamel are proposing in terms of ‘intervocality’ and ‘vocal justice.’ Suffice to say that letting go of the central concept of Linklater’s pedagogy is terrifying and disturbing. Nonetheless, I understand that it must be questioned bravely for it to keep evolving. I’m sure that Kristin would have welcomed this exchanged and met it with the same aplomb that characterized her life.
One aspect that has worked well for me over the years has been the teaching of voice in my second language in the United States. As such, I do not have any need to impose my own voice or my own speech as the model to aspire to. That has also been true in the experiences that I have had teaching in Mexico and in Spain: I of course “sound” Colombian to the Mexican and Spanish students. And “Colombian” isn’t accurate anyway—perhaps “Bogotano” is more appropriate. However, my own journey in adapting Linklater into Spanish brought me back to reading Freire and framing my own experience around the juxtaposition of education towards freedom and education towards obedience. The paradox is that, although Linklater might appear to have been the product of education towards freedom, the way that many folx have been teaching it reflected more an education towards obedience.
Regardless of the language, the central question that I struggle with is “what is this training for?” The professional theatre in the US, and I imagine in other places as well, is such a complicated arena. It exacerbates structures that are oppressive, unjust, and inequitable. Do we fix that first, or do we fix the training of actors first? For many years, I have questioned if I was training actors to find professional work, and execute that work, or to fulfill their biggest artistic potential? Of course, I wish that Hamel and Cahill offered more definitive answers, but I know that this is not possible. I am grateful though for the encouragement to consider “an emerging anti-oppression approach to voice acknowledging the presence of systemic, cultural and institutional barriers and inequalities based on race, gender and other socially constructed identity markers” (134).
Sounding Bodies also points out a frequent disconnect between practice and research, as I understand it as the critical examination and reflection that generates new knowledge. I am part of a group of voice teachers that finds most alignment with a sense of being an ‘artistic practitioner’ and most satisfaction in the experience of being in the studio with the students. On the other hand, there are others invested in a more intellectual understanding. However, I’m beginning to see the possibility of true collaboration and synergy in creative practice research, or in critical creative practice that includes vocal pedagogies. It is my hope as incoming President of the Voice & Speech Trainers Association (VASTA) to center these collaborations, both in our annual conferences, and in our outstanding Voice & Speech Review. As Cahill and Hamel have demonstrated, there is much to gain by this examination.
In conclusion, I will remain on the rackety bridge a while longer and continue to participate in the discourse. It is important to keep examining the full impact of voice in the world—the ethical and philosophical implications and considerations of what we do. Only then may the bridge stabilize itself.
4.11.23 |
Response
Megaphones and Microphones
Sounds circulate. In their movement between and betwixt bodies they pick up meaning. This deceptively simple starting ground for Sounding Bodies: Identity, Injustice, and the Voice (2022) allows Cahill and Hamel to weave a complex picture of the social dimensions to sound. Gender, race, and ability are the three domains they focus on to build a robust ethics of sound and voice, but the aim is not to be exhaustive but rather generative. Tools such as intervocality, their term for the ways relations are built through shared soundscapes, prove to be highly effective for understanding the acoustic politics of everything from Brett Kavanaugh’s chauvinist job application to how we can cultivate more ethical vocal instructors. Complementary to, rather than competitive against, other feminist theories of relationality, intervocality centers the shared soundscapes we find ourselves in and imbues us with a collective responsibility to maintain the atmospheres that enable soundscapes. I’d like to note that the presence of the authors is felt throughout their work. The choice to co-author the book embeds a collaborative spirit into the text, extending and demonstrating the critical tools they present to the audience at the level of composition. It is a first step towards embodying an ethics of the choir, turning what is typically viewed as an individual burden into a collective responsibility for holding the note.
What I’m suggesting, and what I think the book suggests, is that vocal acts do more than form the background of our political worlds, the context for action. Instead, they are affective in particular ways that warrant attention, and the vocality of the response (or the hanging silence of a lack of response) takes on social meaning in relation to the voice. Given the timeliness of the book, it is difficult not to read it with Donald Trump’s voice playing in the back of my head.1 Not just his words—such as the explicit endorsement of fascism within “fine people on both sides” or the emboldening of white nationalist groups with “stand back and stand by”—but specifically the amplification of his words through social media and the news’ obsession with detailing his many lies.
While the authors explicitly point to and unpack Trump’s patriarchal use of vocality, less attention is paid to the technology that mediates his sonic violence towards the public. Left implicit in their analysis is a question of technology and scale as they note that sounds and voices are never pregiven or unmediated events. So, technologies amplify, mediate, or repress voices and in so doing play a crucial role in the feminist sonic politics of our contemporary moment. While they do have a brief but fascinating discussion of Zoom as a highly limited technological platform for voice, I’d like to put forward some preliminary thoughts on two other sonic technologies: the megaphone and the microphone. It’s my hope that the authors find this analysis fruitful around the questions of technological intervention into sound, scale of voice, and power.
Here, I use the megaphone and the microphone broadly as both material technologies and symbolic loci for sound, although I recognize the line between those two things is blurred. As a political organizer, I associate the megaphone with protest. It’s the mobile, distorting, somehow-always-out-of-batteries amplifier for anger at injustices. Cheap enough that it’s accessible to most organizations, yet effective at orienting a crowd of people, we see megaphones in the hands of activists and on zines, pins, flags, and all other manner of activist paraphernalia to signal the voice of the people. Given how widespread megaphones are, it should not surprise us that the police crackdown on their use at protests and challenge the protestor’s use of them as a symbol for justice by asserting that they are a symbol for unruliness (read: racial discontent). This struggle over megaphones comes to a head when the police cite organizers for unauthorized amplified sound—quite literally criminalizing the fact that someone is expressing anger at injustice too loudly. What we see in this example is a contested soundscape where social movements strategically deploy the sonic technology of megaphones, considering when and where to risk arrest in order to amplify their voice.
The necessity of deploying sound strategically to avoid a violent listening ear parallels the discussion of racial “code-switching” and gendered speech patterns that are detailed in the book. Of course, protest, race, and gender are intersecting topics, and the technological limitations of the megaphone here plays an interesting role. For instance, megaphones have a powerful distortive element. This is mostly a limitation of the electronics, a compromise for the portability and affordability of an amplification device. However, it also raises considerations for a politics of concealment. Distortion makes it difficult to hear who is speaking in the sense that the noise coming out of the megaphone rarely sounds anything like the organizer’s speaking voice. The unintended benefit of this distortion is that it makes identifying the organizers more challenging, with recordings rarely matching up to an actual person. In other words, it is a small example of what Tricia Rose calls “going into the red,” where the sonic performance overloads the circuity of state violence as a way of resisting it.2 Activists quite literally hijack the unintended limitations of the technological platform to crank up the sound so much that it becomes indecipherable to some of the State’s listening ear. As a result, the megaphone functions as both a material and symbolic assertion of democratic rights, holding space for a breadth of people and in so doing carve out breathing room for insurgent possibilities.
In contrast, the microphone carries a veneer of authority and respectability. It is the hallmark technology of press conferences given by police chiefs as they try to cover up violence, the weapon of choice for anti-democratic politicians, and the platform for transphobic/racist/sexist pundits who decry being canceled while loudly using the technology to speak over their critics. While this is a reductive simplification, comparatively speaking microphones are a relatively expensive, unwieldy technology requiring external speakers for amplification. Far from being a limitation, its unwieldy nature is part of what makes it an effective symbol of status. This is not always the case, as many public figures have utilized their technological platforms to fight injustice, but the point is that microphones allow people in power to sidestep the question of whether celebrities, the wealthy, or the elite should have the loudest voice in the first place. In other words, we have not confronted a fundamental question of the ethics of voice at scale.
Where the megaphone is relatively localized, an aid for managing crowds but ultimately drowned out by the call and response of the chanting crowd, the microphone allows an individual to dominate the conversation. Consider the discourse surrounding the police, how many people does it take showing up to a protest to drown out the discursive effect of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Kamala Harris, or Joe Biden’s law and order rhetoric? The microphone concentrates power by ensuring that the speeches of politicians get recorded, propagated, played over nightly news, typed up into newspapers, and entered into the mainstream. By contrast, protests against police injustice have a much higher bar to clear to reach even a fraction of that volume, despite being a far more democratic form of civic engagement. The microphone thus serves as both a material and symbolic form of vocal power at scale, dominating the airwaves and sucking up the oxygen in the room.
As a result, scale complicates ethical discussions of violence against people who hold power. The scale of politician’s authority means that any discussion of their individual mistreatment runs the risk of concealing deeper issues with questions of power. It is still important to highlight abuses towards people in power as they’re still worthy of moral consideration and further represent injustices against broader populations, but this ethical consideration has to contextualize the scale at which they operate.
For example, twice in the book the authors reference the dismissive patriarchal politics applied to Hillary Clinton’s voice. As a public figure, Clinton stands in for (white) women who aspire to powerful office, and the authors rightfully argue that the sexism directed towards her sonic embodiment through claims that she’s “shrill” and other sexist canards is a clear sign that women are not welcome in the patriarchal space of electoral politics. However, the ethics of Clinton’s voice is more complicated than simply pointing to how the listening ear frames it. We also must be attuned to how she’s used her voice as Secretary of State to support imperialist wars as well as recognize her history of silencing other women, including Bill Clinton’s accusers of sexual assault. These harms are not incidental to the vocal politics of Hilary Clinton, but rather emblematic of a particular strategy used by people in power who have the mic. On the one hand, it is important to recognize the sexist treatment that Clinton has weathered in the media as she took the mic; however, without a more in-depth account of Clinton as a major public figure, giving her the microphone when it comes to the legitimate critiques of sexism against her runs the risk of concealing other acts of violence. In other words, the microphone, even when amplifying fair critiques, can still function as a silencing technology where one perspective is boosted at the cost of others by virtue of the scale of the technology. I want to stress that the authors’ framework is sympathetic to how this critique complicates the ethics of Clinton’s situation, in essence it demonstrates that a vocal ethic has to be multidimensional and fluid. As they argue, it must grapple with all of the complexities that the voice as a socially situated phenomenon brings to the table.
Being multidimension also means not holding the microphone as some kind of ontologically anti-democratic technology. Following Frantz Fanon’s discussion of the radio in Algeria,3 I believe that all technologies, no matter how violent, can be struggled over and repurposed for resistance. We should not concede the ability to co-opt technologies to the state, after all. However, this incomplete example affords an opportunity to rethink what the technology can do to facilitate democratic engagement and further interrogate how factors like scale play into vocal ethics. Here, the authors give us a gift when they touch on the use of microphones at conferences. Following critiques from disability scholars, they point out that the refusal to take the mic from conference presenters is an exclusionary move. It fundamentally makes the talk less accessible when people refuse the technology outright. Instead of eschewing microphones all together, what I’m proposing with this preliminary, clumsy analysis is that a vocal ethics can get us to start thinking about scale mediating power. It asks us to imagine what it would be like to take the mic from politician’s hands and give it back to smaller scale groups for more ethical uses like accessibility. Or, we can take a lesson from social movements by examining the “human microphone” strategy. This is a tactic where an organizer shouts a phrase, and a crowd will mimic that shout. It amplifies a voice and distributes it, creating a shared sense of purpose and practicing the value of community. In essence, it inverts the hierarchical logic of the elite microphone and uses amplification at a smaller scale to facilitate democratic engagement. Perhaps what we need are fewer microphones and more human microphones, fewer elite individuals holding power and more collective voices. Thankfully, Sounding Bodies moves the needle in this direction and is a triumph.
Spare a thought for my psyche that this was the soundtrack playing in the background.↩
Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Music/Culture (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994).↩
Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier, Nachdr. (New York, NY: Grove Press, 1965).↩
Margaret Kemp
Response
Voicing My Quiet
-Toni Morrison
–Audre Lorde
Sounding Bodies: Identity, Injustice, and the Voice. The title of this work by Ann J. Cahill and Christine Hamel intrigues me. As a performing artist and theater teacher (voice, speech, and acting) whose instruction is rooted in social justice, I was fired up to dig in.
The italicized portion of the following statement squelched the fire: “Our aim as coauthors in initiating this scholarly conversation embracing two distinct fields (feminist philosophy and theatre studies) is to focus on the politics of voice and to increase attunement to various forms of vocal injustice” (1). This declaration awoke in me a pot of questions that has been simmering on the stove for the past thirty years.
During the late 1980s, in a large lecture hall with more than one hundred and fifty white female students, I sat between two African American friends and classmates in my very first feminist philosophy class. We three—the only Black students in the class—were from the Northeast, Midwest, and Deep South regions of the United States. The three of us never spoke within the container that is the class/room. This non-speaking was partially because there never seemed to be room for our voices or thoughts. Inclusion needs to be intentional in a class with over one hundred and fifty students. The instructor did not “intend to include” us. It was also partially due to the fear of reprisal if we fully expressed our thoughts. What would happen to our grades if we disagreed?
So, it surprised two of us (or perhaps even all three of us) when Kim Branch arose matter-of-factly from her place between us and addressed the room with the same nonchalance with which the white students engaged. “What is all the fuss about?” she said. “I don’t even see why this is a subject at all. My mother, grandmother, and great-gran have dealt with this stuff all their lives! Y’all acting like these ideas are news. Like you thought them up. These ideas have been part of my life forever. Is it because you just noticed it, put a label on it…is that why it’s now important to study—important to change?”
After class, I recall Kim shaking while voicing, “I just had to say it…I just had to speak.” Responding to Sounding Bodies, I feel a lot like Kim Branch did on that day thirty years ago. I struggle with feminist philosophy as a lens through which to enter this book, as well as my personal art and craft of teaching.
Before embarking on this essay, I tried to put that experience—that weight of my personal relationship to feminist philosophy—away. I don’t think about feminist philosophy much. But reading the words stirred an anxious physical response in my chest (or heart). Secretly, I wished I hadn’t said yes to writing this response. I had hoped to put my personal response away quickly and get into the very rich research that is a part of this book. But I couldn’t. I had to reconnect with the roots of the physical response before I could rigorously engage with the entire book.
I have a lot in common with author Roxanne Gay, who admits in her ground-breaking book Bad Feminist that it is not useful in the world we live in today to freely accept, without interrogation, the term “feminist philosophy.” On March 4, 2022, I did a keyword image search for the term “feminism,” and this image emerged early on:
TIME—past, present, and future. TIME lingers here. The photo hit me in the gut. Like this photograph, the term “feminist theory” has an archive that needs attending. What is the unspoken historical structure in this image? What is the relationship between the settled body of Gloria Steinem and the space she inhabits in this photo? The ease in her body and face are equally welcoming and troubling. See how the floor, which in this photo looks cloud-like, supports the anti-war protest language (or is it?) that she effortlessly holds.
In this essay, I am meditating on how to enter the term feminist philosophy. I am picking under the space around the seated Steinem as well as the red frame that holds the image. The quote from the book’s introduction is on repeat in my brain: “Our aim as coauthors in initiating this scholarly conversation embracing two distinct fields (feminist philosophy and theatre studies) is to focus attention on the politics of voice and to increase attunement to various forms of vocal injustice.”
“Focusing attention” through the lens of feminist theory requires me to interrogate that lens as an archive and a container. What is the container designed to hold? Who made the container? What does the container exclude?
Revered African American thinkers and artists such as Toni Morrison and Fred Moten insist that the African American autobiographical voice holds a place as theory in intra- and inter-disciplinary fields within the academy. I feel the same, so starting this response with an autobiographical narrative is natural to me. However, I am an African American female performing artist. And what I am actually politely saying is that, culturally and academically, many people may feel I don’t have the credentials—or, as one colleague of my current institution said, I “don’t have the scholarship to participate in critical dialogues.” Mirroring my undergraduate experience, my voice is rarely brought into academic and philosophical rooms. So, participating in this dialogue is a first for me. I acknowledge the intention of Cahill and Hamel to bring a new voice into the academy to rigorously interrogate the archive that rests behind the history of marginalization and in light of the current political and social unrest (too soft of a word) that threaten the nation and the world. I appreciate the opportunity to participate and voice my quiet.
For me to move forward, I needed to move back and find a new relationship with “feminism” as a philosophy. I could go way, way back to Phillis Wheatly or way back to Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton at Seneca Falls in the interest of addressing years of erasure in scholarship and history. I offer these names for those who don’t know how they to connect the subject at hand. If you are reading this and don’t know these names, you should look them up. But in the interest of time, I will just go back to Audre Lorde, who in the 1970s led the way in questioning the fears that arise when difference is acknowledged. She made this point often: “Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways to actively ‘be’ in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.”1 I love this statement. It applies directly to the work that Cahill and Hamel contribute to the field of voice pedagogy and practice. With this statement, Lorde, like me, is questioning the idea of feminism and asking more of those who consider themselves feminist. Since there is no way for me to un-feel the dis-easy messiness this term stirs in my body, I question what Cahill and Hamel have set out to do in their book. I wonder: how one can question attunement to various forms of vocal injustice without first troubling the lens of “feminist philosophy” as an archive that historically holds within its own frame “various forms of vocal injustice?”
To rigorously engage with Sounding Bodies, I gathered my friends beside me, just as I had in my undergraduate class. Now, however, my friends are no longer quiet. They are vocal across time and disciplines. My friends are my imagined colleagues—those whose scholarship, interests, and curiosity have helped me parse through my dis-ease to update and reimagine the term “feminist theory.” I had conversations with these friends in the form of reading the works of bell hooks, Jennifer C. Nash, Christina Sharpe, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Cherie Moraga, to name a few. I also refreshed my relationship with civil rights activist and legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989.
While “intersectionality” is defined in Sounding Bodies, it is helpful to reiterate that it describes how systems of oppression overlap to create distinct experiences for people with multiple identity categories.2 The legal roots are important, and, in acknowledging the metaphorical value of the term, it is important to acknowledge Crenshaw’s own thought (as labor): “Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them.”3 In Black Feminism after Intersectionality, Jennifer C. Nash offers this additional and necessary reflection:
To enter the work of Sounding Bodies, I had to listen for and hear the many voices of the Black feminists whose scholarship and voices are imbedded in the scholarship but have been “disappeared” by the academy and by those who call themselves feminists.
Saidiya Hartman’s “speculative histories” practice offers another way to listen to Black feminists. Hartman’s work is the product of years of wading through heaps of handwritten notes on the backs of photos, police records, post cards, love letters, bills, eviction notices, and other found materials. She mingles her findings to write what she calls speculative fiction, bringing the ambient sounds and minor keys of Black life into the room. Reading her work, I couldn’t help but exclaim: this is feminist voice theory and pedagogy. The texts engaged here are a type of autobiography that, when excluded from feminist philosophy, represent disappeared black intellectual labor and thought. And here, Jennifer C. Nash’s words become even more salient:
My thoughts fall into free jazz…
A Container
Not Silent
A vessel.
A vessel?
Even when quiet
Even when disappeared.
A strategy among strategies for
Listening
For recovery.
As I continued to write this essay, I started to feel like a kind of feminist who was developing a “Black feminist after intersectionality, post-Black Lives Matter”-type of feminist philosophy. I realized that for me to fully “be in the room/salon,” I need to engage in the recovery work of the feminist archive that has been disappeared by universities, the academy, and scholars.
I agree with the call to action that is Sounding Bodies:
I agree with it, and add my voice, saying: we, as colleagues, have work to do. This work starts with and must remain with questioning the framework, questioning around the framework, and questioning in a detailed manner what is holding the frame. Dear reader, to know who I am, know that I am responding to Sounding Bodies through my lens as a Black feminist after intersectionality and post-Black Lives Matter, engage in the recovery work of Black and Brown critical thought.
The anxious feelings this book woke within my heart have started to relax. Part of the importance of this book is that it asks a willing, curious reader to examine the book as an abundant text filled with useful and challenging materials presented by both authors. It invites readers to examine the lens through which the material is presented as an opportunity to deeply examine oneself as academic, artist, teacher, and human being. I suggest that from this self-examination, you may discover your own strategy for reimagining your work and yourself, as I have.
Emerging from Sounding Bodies, I embrace my own lens: Black feminism, after intersectionality, within Black Lives Matter, engaged in the recovery work of Black and Brown critical thought. It is my framework and dialectical strategy as I embark on re-shaping existing pedagogies and inventing new approaches for voice training.
Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches of Audre Lorde (Berkeley: Crossing, 1984), 111.↩
Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991), 1241–99.↩
Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1, Article 8, 149.↩
Jennifer C. Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (Duke University Press, 2019), 5.↩
Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined, 5.↩
3.21.23 | Ann J. Cahill and Christine Hamel
Reply
Response to Margaret Kemp
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.