Author: Anne Carson
History is filled with unacceptable sounds: high-pitched voices, gossip, talkativeness, hysteria, wailing, ritual shouts. From whom? Those deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control: women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes. From antiquity to Margaret Thatcher via Sigmund Freud and Gertrude Stein, this title charts the gendering of sound in Western culture. Carson invites us to listen again, and in doing so to reimagine our conceptions of human order, virtue and selfhood.Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death.