The Gender of Sound traces the ideological machinery by which Western culture, from antiquity to the present, has cast women's voices as monstrous, disorderly, and dangerous — and asks what it might mean to listen differently. 38 words.
About This Book
From the wailing of ancient women to the managed tones of Margaret Thatcher, The Gender of Sound maps a persistent cultural project: the silencing of voices deemed deviant from a masculine ideal of self-control. Anne Carson draws on antiquity, Sigmund Freud, and Gertrude Stein to show how gossip, hysteria, ritual shouts, and high-pitched speech have been systematically coded as threats to human order. At just 48 pages, this essay is compressed and precise — a short text that opens onto long histories of gendered sound, voice, and patriarchal control. Essential reading for anyone thinking about language, power, and the politics of speech.
Key Features
- 48 pages of essayistic prose moving across classical antiquity, psychoanalysis, and modernist literature
- Published by Silver Press, ISBN: 9781739371791
What You'll Discover
- How the association of female sound with monstrosity and death has functioned as a disciplinary tool across Western history
- The ideological continuity linking ancient constructions of deviant voice — women, catamites, eunuchs, androgynes — to modern political speech
- Carson's readings of Freud and Gertrude Stein as nodes in a longer argument about the gendering of self-control and vocal virtue
- An invitation to reimagine the categories of human order and selfhood by attending to the voices that have been systematically suppressed
About the Author
Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, and classicist whose work moves between ancient Greek literature and contemporary critical thought. Her writing consistently destabilises genre, combining scholarship, lyric, and philosophical inquiry into forms that resist easy categorisation.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 48
- Dimensions: 16 x 11.5 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781739371791
- Publisher: Silver Press
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Readers in gender studies, classical studies, literary criticism, and philosophy; architects and designers engaged with questions of voice, power, and spatial politics; anyone drawn to Anne Carson's practice of essayistic inquiry.