Listening with a Feminist Ear Soundwork in Bombay Cinema

• Main Author: Sundar, Pavitra
• Format: eBook Book
• Language: English
• Published: Ann Arbor University of Michigan Press 2023
• Subjects: accent; Asian Studies; audiovisual contract; aural lag; Bambaiyya; body; Bollywood; Bombay cinema; cinephilia; classic qawwali; communal; Cultural & Ethnic Studies; cultural politics; dargah qawwali; dialogue; Ethnic Studies / Asian Studies; Ethnomusicology; Feminism and motion pictures; Feminism and motion pictures > Mumbai; feminist ear; Film Studies; Films, cinema; gangster genre; gender; Hindi cinema; India; inter-aural; Islamicate; item number; language; liberalization; Listening; listening public; media; millennial soundwork; Motion pictures; Motion pictures > Social aspects > India Mumbai; Multi-Cultural; Music; musical; musicking; nation; Nonfiction; Performing arts; playback; qawwali; regional; religion; romance; sexuality; singing; Social aspects; Social groups, communities and identities; Social Science; Society and culture: general; Society and Social Sciences; Sociology; somatic clause; song sequences; sound; Sound in motion pictures; soundtrack; soundwork; speaking; speech; Sufipop; tapori; Television; The Arts; Theory of music and musicology; voice; Voice in motion pictures; voicing; xenophone; Mumbai; India
• DOI: 10.3998/mpub.11713921
• ISBN: 0472132482; 9780472132485; 9780472039371; 0472039377; 9780472903665; 0472903667

Listening with a Feminist Ear is a study of the cultural politics and possibilities of sound in cinema. Eschewing ocularcentric and siloed disciplinary formations, the book takes seriously the radical theoretical and methodological potential of listening. It models a feminist interpretive practice that is not just attuned to how power and privilege are materialized in sound, but that engenders new, counter-hegemonic imaginaries. Focusing on mainstream Bombay cinema, Sundar identifies singing, listening, and speaking as key sites in which gendered notions of identity and difference take form. Charting new paths through seven decades of film, media, and cultural history, Sundar identifies key shifts in women’s playback voices and the Islamicate genre of the qawwali. She also conceptualizes spoken language as sound, and turns up the volume on a capacious, multilingual politics of belonging that scholarly and popular accounts of nation typically render silent. All in all, Listening with a Feminist Ear offers a critical sonic sensibility that reinvigorates debates about the gendering of voice and body in cinema, and the role of sound and media in conjuring community.