paper airplanes

Kathleen Rowe, The Unruly Woman: Gender & The Genres of Laughter

…voices in any culture that are not meant to be heard are perceived as loud when they do speak, regardless of their decibel level.

“The Gender of Sound,” Glass, Irony and God, Anne Carson

Aristotle tells us that the high-pitched voice of the female is one evidence of her evil disposition, for creatures who are brave or just (like lions, bulls, roosters and the human male) have large deep voices…. High vocal pitch goes together with talkativeness to characterize a person who is deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control. Women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes fall into this category. Their sounds are bad to hear and make men uncomfortable…. 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…. Woman is that creature who puts the inside on the outside. By projections and leakages of all kinds—somatic, vocal, emotional, sexual—females expose or expend what should be kept in…. [As Plutarch comments,] “…she should as modestly guard against exposing her voice to outsiders as she would guard against stripping off her clothes. For in her voice as she is blabbering away can be read her emotions, her character and her physical condition.”… Every sound we make is a bit of autobiography. It has a totally private interior yet its trajectory is public. A piece of inside projected to the outside. The censorship of such projections is a task of patriarchal culture that (as we have seen) divides humanity into two species: those who can censor themselves and those who cannot…. It is an axiom of ancient Greek and Roman medical theory and anatomical discussion that a woman has two mouths. The orifice through which vocal activity takes place and the orifice through which sexual activity takes place are both denoted by the word stoma in Greek (os in Latin) with the addition of adverbs ano and kato to differentiate upper mouth from lower mouth. Both the vocal and the genital mouth are connected to the body by the neck (auchen in Greek, cervix in Latin). Both mouths provide access to a hollow cavity which is guarded by lips that are best kept closed. 

“Introduction: A Tarantella of Theory,” Sandra M. Gilbert in The Newly Born Woman, Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément

There is a voice crying in the wilderness, Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous say—the voice of a body dancing, laughing, shrieking, crying. Whose is it? It is, they say, the voice of a woman, newborn and yet archaic, a voice of milk and blood, a voice silenced but savage.

“New World Order: The Scream’s a Good Weapon,” Sarah Nicole Prickett

The scream’s a good weapon—fast, concealed. Sometimes the only one we’ve got. When babes imperiled are furthermore mute, like Helen in The Spiral Staircase (1949), Madeline in the Swedish Thriller (1973), and Thana in Ms. 45 (1981), or speechless, like Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion (1965), the situation feels irremediable. A girl without tongue is a eunuch.

“Medea Gives Advice to a Young Girl with a Broken Heart,” Letters From Medea, Salma Deera

For only $100, you can empower a woman in India. This manageable amount, according to the website of the organization India Partners, will provide a woman with her own sewing machine, allowing her to take the very first step on the march to empowerment. Or you can send a chicken. Poultry farming, according to Melinda Gates, empowers women in developing countries by allowing them to “express their dignity and seize control.” If chickens are not your empowerment tool of choice, Heifer International will, for $390, deliver an “enterpriser basket” to a woman in Africa. It includes rabbits, juvenile fish and silkworms.

The assumption behind all of these donations is the same: Women’s empowerment is an economic issue, one that can be separated from politics. It follows, then, that it can be resolved by a benevolent Western donor who provides sewing machines or chickens, and thus delivers the women of India (or Kenya or Mozambique or wherever in what’s known as the “global south”) from their lives of disempowered want.

[…]

In handing out chickens or sewing machines, Western feminists and development organizations can point to the non-Western women they have “empowered.” The non-Western subjects of their efforts can be shown off at conferences and featured on websites. Development professionals can point to training sessions, workshops and spreadsheets laden with “deliverables” as evidence of another successful empowerment project.

In this system there is little room for the complexities of the recipients. Non-Western women are reduced to mute, passive subjects awaiting rescue.

Take, for instance, the Gates Foundation’s poultry farming projects. Bill Gates has insisted that because chickens are small animals kept close to the home, they are particularly suited to “empowering” women. But researchers haven’t found that giving out chickens leads to any long-term economic gains — much less emancipation or equality for half the population.

[…]

On the global stage, a return to this original model of empowerment requires a moratorium on reducing non-Western women to the circumstances of their victimhood — the rape survivor, the war widow, the child bride. The idea that development goals and agendas should be apolitical must be discarded.

Jane Jacobs (via stoweboyd)

JANE.