Listening to Gender: A Response to Judith Halberstam

Abstract

THE AURAL DIMENSIONS OF GENDER AND sexuality--voice and music--have haunted margins of theory but have seldom factored as centrally as visual. Scopophilia--the privileging of sight--has become a mainstay in theory, tied to physical morphology, namely, presence or absence of penis. This primary visual division of bodies into haves and have-nots, around which gender roles have been formed, has relegated aural component of gender as something akin to a secondary sex characteristic. Judith Butler has made some tantalizing references to sound and music. In Bodies That Matter she writes that the process of signification is always material; signs work by appearing (visibly, aurally). (1) Aurally seems thrown in here as a gesture toward spoken language, but what she has most in mind (signification is always material; signs work by appearing) is clearly visual display. Then there is Butler's clever invocation of Aretha Franklin and her recording of Natural Woman in famous essay Imitation and Gender Insubordination: Well, consider way in which heterosexuality naturalizes itself through setting up certain illusions of continuity sex, gender, and desire. When Aretha Franklin sings, make me feel like a she seems at first to suggest that some potential of her biological sex is actualized by her participation in cultural position of as object of heterosexual recognition.... Although Aretha appears to be all too glad to have her naturalness confirmed, she also seems fully and paradoxically mindful that that confirmation is never guaranteed, that effect of naturalness is only achieved as a consequence of that moment of heterosexual recognition. After all, Aretha sings, you make me feel like a woman, suggesting that this is a kind of metaphorical substitution, an act of imposture, a kind of sublime and momentary participation in an ontological illusion produced by mundane operation of heterosexual drag. (2) Here pop song inadvertently articulates Butler's theory; it is theory au naturel, so to speak, a song that stumbles upon what Butler believes is a truth about untruth of gender. Butler does not ask us to hear any meaning in register or timbre of Aretha's voice or to think about performance of words or interaction of Franklin with female back-up vocalists. We are only meant to listen through Franklin's voice (as if transparent) to message that Butler elaborates; that message is essentially to retrain ourselves to recognize a natural woman as a type of queen. By contrast to Judith Butler, Judith Halberstam is one theorist working outside musicology who has taken music and voice seriously. In her book Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives she discusses how subcultural music can sometimes function as an archive, bridging generations and blurring typical polarity academic and lay historians. Halberstam notes that this engagement of lesbian feminist past by present-day riot dykes can occur in a variety of ways: through lyrical references that name-check key writers or theorists, through programming at concerts that juxtaposes older and newer acts, and through cover songs that pay tribute to rather than parody a classic number from women's music back catalog. (3) Halberstam argues that music can create queer genealogies as well as alternative temporalities. One such temporality halts march of time to heteronormative adulthood and family, lingering instead in adolescence, a time of social rebellion and experimentation. Another temporality accesses and reinvests in past, forcing present moment into a complex relationship between 'now' of performance and 'then' of historical time. (4) For this Halberstam has drawn on concept of temporal drag advanced by Elizabeth Freeman, whose work offers a sly critique of absence of history in Butler's theory. …