The Gender of Sound by Anne Carson

The Gender of Sound by Anne Carson

History is filled with unacceptable noises: high pitch, gossip, talkativeness, hysteria, wailing and ritual shouts. Who makes them? Those deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control: women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes fall into this category.

From the myths of antiquity to Margaret Thatcher via Sigmund Freud and Gertrude Stein, The Gender of Sound charts the gendering of voice through Western culture. This enquiry into the way we hear sounds invites reimagining 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.

Anne Carson was born in Toronto in 1950 and taught Classics at universities across North America for more than forty years. Since the publication of her first book, Eros the Bittersweet, in 1986, Carson has produced a series of remarkable collections of poetry, translations, essays and talks, weaving between languages and genres and creating new forms of expression.

Among her many translations of Classical works are her versions of the Oresteia, Antigone, Electra and Herakles, as well as her spellbinding renditions of Sappho. Desire, death and selfhood, our literary inheritance and our relationship to the past, recur in her writings as unresolved subjects. Her many prizes include Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, the T.S. Eliot prize and the Lannan Literary Award.