Women's Voices in Digital Media: The Sonic Screen from Film to Memes

By Jennifer O'Meara

2023 Publication Award Honorable Mention, British Association for Film, Television and Screen Studies

An examination of the sound and silence of women in digital media.

In today’s digital era, women’s voices are heard everywhere—from smart home devices to social media platforms, virtual reality, podcasts, and even memes—but these new forms of communication are often accompanied by dated gender politics. In Women’s Voices in Digital Media, Jennifer O’Meara dives into new and well-established media formats to show how contemporary screen media and cultural practices police and fetishize women’s voices, but also provide exciting new ways to amplify and empower them.

As she travels through the digital world, O’Meara discovers newly acknowledged—or newly erased—female voice actors from classic films on YouTube, meets the AI and digital avatars in Her and The Congress, and hears women’s voices being disembodied in new ways via podcasts and VR voice-overs. She engages with dialogue that is spreading with only the memory of a voice, looking at how popular media like Clueless and The Simpsons have been mined for feminist memes, and encounters vocal ventriloquism on RuPaul’s Drag Race that queers and valorizes the female voice. Through these detailed case studies, O’Meara argues that the digital proliferation of screens alters the reception of sounds as much as that of images, with substantial implications for women’s voices.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Release date: Apr 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781477324462

Book preview

Louann Atkins Temple Women & Culture Series

Women’s Voices in Digital Media

THE SONIC SCREEN FROM FILM TO MEMES

Jennifer O’Meara

University of Texas Press

Austin

The Louann Atkins Temple Women & Culture Series is supported by Allison, Doug, Taylor, and Andy Bacon; Margaret, Lawrence, Will, John, and Annie Temple; Larry Temple; the Temple-Inland Foundation; and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Texas Press

All rights reserved

First edition, 2022

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: O’Meara, Jennifer, author.

Title: Women’s voices in digital media : the sonic screen from film to memes / Jennifer O’Meara.

Other titles: Louann Atkins Temple women & culture series.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2022. | Series: Louann Atkins Temple Women & Culture Series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021038184

ISBN 978-1-4773-2443-1 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2444-8 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2445-5 (PDF)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2446-2 (ePub)

Subjects: LCSH: Women in mass media. | Voice in mass media—Political aspects. | Voice in mass media—Social aspects. | Digital media—Technological innovations. | Gender identity in mass media. | Sex role. | Voice-overs—Political aspects. | Voice actors and actresses—Political aspects.

Classification: LCC P94.5.W65 O44 2022 | DDC 305.3—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021038184

doi:10.7560/324431

CONTENTS

Introduction: Proliferating Screens and a New Vocal Vortex

CHAPTER 1. Film Voices + Time: Excavating Vocal Histories on Digital Platforms

CHAPTER 2. The (Post)Human Voice and Feminized Machines in Anomalisa, The Congress, and Her

CHAPTER 3. The Expanded and Immersive Voice-Over

CHAPTER 4. Karina Longworth and the Remixing of Actresses’ Voices on the You Must Remember This Podcast

CHAPTER 5. Meme Girls versus Trump: The Silent Voices of Subtitled Screenshots

CHAPTER 6. RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Queered Remediation of Women’s Voices

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Filmography

Bibliography

Digital Artifacts

Index

INTRODUCTION

PROLIFERATING SCREENS AND A NEW VOCAL VORTEX

IN OCTOBER 2004, ONE MONTH AHEAD OF the release of Nintendo’s new DS gaming console, the company began to screen three brief, sexually charged advertisements in movie theaters and on television. Part of a marketing blitz centered around the slogan Touching is Good, the ads aimed to highlight distinctive properties of the Nintendo DS device: that it incorporated a microphone allowing for voice commands, that one of the device’s two screens was a touch screen, and that the device was Wi-Fi enabled, allowing users to interact with other consoles.¹ They featured a whispering, disembodied female voice that issued commands with sexual overtones to would-be users of the device: Touch the bottom rectangle. . . . please. Go ahead, touch it.² The on-screen graphics were notably bland by comparison, including a static-dotted black screen and a bright blue rectangle from which the DS materialized. The woman’s voice continued to offer encouragement for us to reach out and touch (You might like it), purposefully delivering promises of sexual satisfaction that she (and the device) would never be able to fulfill.

With these advertisements playing in cinemas and on television, as well as online, the woman’s prominent, if anonymous, voice entered into a dialectical relationship with the historical treatment of the screened female voice: disembodied voice-overs in classical Hollywood cinema were rarely granted to women; indeed, women’s voices were fundamentally tethered to women’s on-screen bodies. In exploiting the sexualized potential of women’s voices, Nintendo caused a stir. And within just a few years, new digital incarnations of feminine voices were causing other stirs. These incarnations included the strange popularity of autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) videos of women recording themselves whispering to a YouTube camera with a view to relaxing their imagined audience, or the sensation of hearing Hollywood actress Scarlett Johansson read sexy Bible verses via the audio streaming site SoundCloud.³ As film and media scholar Joceline Andersen observed of the former, there is a distinct gendering to such whispering videos. They are generally performed in domestic settings and [re-create] heteronormative models of care and intimacy directed by women toward men.⁴ Although the content creators and consumers generally aim to distance whisper videos from associations with sexual fetishes, the affective use of the female voice recalls earlier incarnations of the sexualized, disembodied female voice—such as the erotic blue disc phonographs of the 1930s to the 1950s, or the phone sex hotlines that emerged in the United States in the late 1970s, thanks to the former porn star and magazine publisher Gloria Leonard.⁵ The Nintendo DS ads similarly assumed that a woman’s breathy voice would appeal to the company’s main target audience of heterosexual men.

The streaming of Johansson’s sexy Bible readings on SoundCloud is also enmeshed in this history. As part of a concept album by comedian Mike O’Brien, Johansson plays on associations around her husky voice while sexualizing misogynistic passages from Deuteronomy about punishments women should receive for bad behavior, such as having their hands cut off. Johansson’s contribution to the album extends on disembodied filmic uses of her voice, such as in Her (Spike Jonze, 2013), where she voices an immaterial operating system with such charm that the male protagonist falls for her. O’Brien redirects these aspects of Johansson’s voice and her persona into another medium, audio streaming, and into another genre, comedy. Previews of her vocal contribution were used in publicity for the album online across a range of websites, from Rolling Stone to World Religion News.⁶

The Nintendo ads, the ASMR videos, the Johansson recording, and similar offerings set the digital stage for a range of screen-based media to present the female voice in ways that were paradoxically both increasingly intimate and sensuous and increasingly processed via technological means. While distinctly digital-born in their programming and distribution, all three of these examples fit within the broader landscape of women’s digitized screen voices (including voice-activated assistants, such as Apple’s Siri)—and, indeed, within a much longer history of women’s technologized voices, dating back to Thomas Edison’s talking dolls (1890) and Bell Telephone Laboratories’ Voder machine (1939). The Voder (a contraction of Voice Operating Demonstrator) was the first technology to successfully approximate the objective of electronically synthesized human speech.⁷ Like the Nintendo DS, the machine was intrinsically linked to both women and the sense of touch. Although it was invented by a man, Homer Dudley, an acoustic engineer, it was operated almost entirely by women, particularly Helen Harper, who trained some thirty other women as operators of the contraption, which was played by the hands like an organ (figure 0.1).⁸

Figure 0.1. Diagram of a woman operating Bell Telephone Laboratories’ Voder, produced by Homer Dudley, in The Carrier Nature of Speech, Bell System Technical Journal, October 1940.

Responses to these historically distant technologized voices can be similar to the reception of more modern examples: a mix of excitement, amusement, and anxiety at the unnerving combination of masculine machines and female embodiment. Like the controversy around blue discs, recordings of sexualized voices that were often played in public, male-dominated settings, such as taverns,⁹ discourse around the Nintendo DS, the ASMR whisper videos, and Johansson’s viral comedy file has highlighted the fact that they all promote distinctly gendered forms of pleasure in listening. These listening formats and environments can encourage or reflect a fetishization of the technologized female voice, particularly when its arousing properties are emphasized through performative traits such as breathiness.¹⁰

But what of the role of the screen in the portrayal of the female voice? Edison’s dolls and the Voder typically had to be experienced in person: for example, the dolls could be purchased or viewed at the Exhibition of the Wonders of Electricity in 1890, while the Voder was demonstrated at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. But these voices might also be broadcast over the radio, and people could read about them in newspapers. In the digital era, the technologized female voice is rarely experienced without some form of screen, be it that of a computer, smart device, television, cinema screen, or virtual reality headset. Moreover, owing to the diverse archival platforms of the internet, one can now also experience the likes of Edison’s dolls and the Voder via short-form videos on YouTube and similar sites. Such videos are marked by the amateur qualities of grassroots digital media production, a Frankenstein-like mixing of images, video, audio clips, and on-screen text. Regardless of the video quality, streaming platforms screen these once-analog voices for the masses while allowing them to coexist alongside their vocal contemporaries.

Figure 0.2. Screenshot of PBS NewsHour YouTube video, Edison’s Talking Dolls: Child’s Toy or Stuff of Nightmares, May 6, 2015.

Furthermore, we can now hear Edison’s dolls again precisely because of digital technologies that have allowed for such voices to be reformatted. These technologies include ways of translating audio properties into visual imagery. As media archaeologist Paul Flaig explained, the voices of Edison’s talking dolls were resurrected through the use of a 3D optical scanning system that probes the grooves of recording surfaces like wax or shellac with a line scan camera, digitally reconstructing these imperceptible depths into a series of images that are subsequently mapped in 3D and converted into a WAV audio format.¹¹ Freed from their origins via modernity and mechanics, these voices have been reborn in digital formats, in the process becoming subject to the visual norms of internet culture. For a PBS NewsHour segment on the vocal resurrection of the dolls, the production team edited together still images of them and, to create a sense of movement, used basic software and rudimentary zooming to feature artificial close-ups of the dolls’ bodies (figure 0.2).¹²

Figure 0.3. Screenshot of Caroline ASMR YouTube video, ASMR Super Slowwww Hand Movements and Trigger Words for Sleep, June 14, 2020.

While the video’s raison d’être may be to allow a twenty-first-century audience to hear their uncanny voices, the visual techniques inadvertently link the dolls to the closely framed shots of women in YouTube’s ASMR whisper videos (figure 0.3). In the whisper videos, the body is often fragmented, with framings that go against the norms for how people are generally presented on screen.¹³ In both cases, the speaking female subject is the central focal point, her microphone and mouth centered in the frame, with other parts of her face and body cropped out as unnecessary. With regard to the technologized female voice and its media iconography, these visual parallels raise crucial questions about precisely what has changed and what has stayed the same in the 120-plus years separating the two types of recordings, which sit at opposite sides of the analog-digital divide. Yet, with access to them via digital screens now ubiquitous, both nonetheless contribute to the cacophony of women’s technologized screen voices in the twenty-first century. This book addresses these technological developments and their historical precursors, pioneering a transmedial approach to analyzing women’s screen voices in the digital era. It explores how such voices can travel from one screen medium to another, in the form of verbal or vocal echoes, and how the proliferation of screens in the digital age can alter the reception of mediated voices as much as images, with substantial implications for women and culture. By examining the complexities of the vocal landscape in the digital era, we will see how contemporary screen media and cultural practices have not only amplified women’s voices, including historical ones, in new ways, but also provided new ways to fetishize, police, and silence them. With a dual focus on female characters and performers in English-language media, my study shows that digital technologies are influencing how women’s voices are recorded, represented, received, and remediated. It considers not only traditional screen formats (such as cinema and television) but also other digital formats and practices, detailing how voices first presented via traditional screens can travel into digital formats and practices. Finally, it theorizes the increased portability of female speech and vocal recordings as well as the gendered politics of what comes to pass when certain words or voices made famous on screen are reused in other contexts.

Susan Sontag’s pessimistic account of the decay of cinema in 1996 linked the rapid proliferation of screens (images now appear in any size and on a variety of surfaces) to not really seeing a given film. The smaller scale of nontheatrical screens and the problem of inattention in modern settings and lives were both at issue. For Sontag, the viewer was no longer overwhelmed by the physical presence of the image as in a traditional movie theater.¹⁴ Subsequent discourse on the proliferation of screens has maintained this focus on the image even when the reference point is audiovisual texts. Media studies scholar Will Straw described such screen content, for example, as obscure, flickering imagery, and said it consisted of murky fluctuations of movement and colour, unfolding at the margins of our vision or attention. However, the majority of devices with screens could also be understood as devices with speakers. And just as what is playing on the screens can be analyzed for its imagery, what plays through the speakers can be analyzed for its aural features. I contend that these aural features reflect digital media’s dissolution of boundaries and new ways of hearing—or, more precisely, new ways of audio-viewing.¹⁵

It can take an extreme example to raise awareness of the impact of the proliferation of devices with screens on our everyday listening experience. Such was the case in May 2018 when social media users perplexedly debated the Yanny or Laurel audio illusion. A huge debate erupted over which of these two-syllable words was spoken and recorded in a viral clip. The discrepancy in what listeners heard was due to a complex intermixing of technology (in terms of both recording devices and speaker quality) and biology (with age impacting whether listeners could hear the higher frequencies). As speech and hearing sciences expert Benjamin Munson explained, those who could hear Yanny had really great headphones or very good hearing.¹⁶ The low-quality nature of the file contributed to its audio ambiguity. Laurel was one of some thirty-six thousand words that actor Jay Aubrey recorded for the website Vocabulary.com.¹⁷ As the example illustrated, digitized voices can be radically shaped by conversion processes and distribution technologies. And while Sontag and Straw cited inattention to images as a problem in the late twentieth century, the Yanny or Laurel phenomenon shows how the opposite dynamic can take place, with images and voice recordings receiving increased scrutiny.

VOCAL (DIS)EMBODIMENT ACROSS TIME AND SPACE

The stakes involved in better understanding the gendered dynamics of digitized screen voices are high. Online discourse surrounding women in audiovisual media is increasingly structured around metaphors of the voice—from the overt silencing of female gamers in Gamergate to the digital sensation of the Bechdel test. The former refers to the controversy over sexism in gamer communities. The latter concerns a measure of sexism in film and other media that rates representations of women using a simplistic formula: whether there are two or more female characters who talk about something other than a man.¹⁸ Similar discussions stressed the need for women in the media to speak up, as reflected in the 2014 Twitter campaign #AskHerMore, which challenged interviewers not to ask women in Hollywood superficial questions on the red carpet. Yet, within screen studies, the sustained influence of feminist film scholar Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze has channeled attention toward women’s visual representation and away from women’s verbal and vocal representation.¹⁹ There have been relatively few exceptions to this prioritization of the visual aspects of the portrayal of women in screen media. Looking to cinema, in particular, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, critical theorists Kaja Silverman and Amy Lawrence focused on connections between the woman’s body and voice through analysis of classical Hollywood, particularly voice-overs, using the psychoanalytic frameworks of the time.²⁰ They argued that women in film were frequently attributed unreliable speech, punished for talking, or silenced altogether. More than a decade later, in Into the Vortex: Female Voice and Paradox in Film, Britta H. Sjogren questioned Silverman’s and Lawrence’s influential claims in order to offer a more empowered account of how women’s voices function in relation to 1940s Hollywood cinema. She reminded us of the danger of generalizing in relation to gendered forms of silencing.²¹

Sjogren’s attention to the vortexical movement of the voice as it relates to voice-off (when we hear the voice of a character not visible within the frame) and signification provides a particularly productive entry point to the digital screen voice. For Sjogren, approaches to the gendered voice-over and embodiment by the likes of Silverman place undue emphasis on linearity and time at the expense of circularity and space: Far from seeing the delays, the flashbacks, the holding up of time, the privileging of space, the circularity and stasis of these texts as negative attributes that lock the female protagonist ‘inside’ the narrative, I question the notion that ‘exteriority’ to the text translates into a superior subjective placement for a character.²² My study is often concerned precisely with how screen voices, in their fragments or wholes, travel in the digital era to occupy new spaces and formats. In Sjogren’s terminology, such characters and performers can be both inside the narrative and exterior to it, regardless of whether their voice (or voice-over) is embodied. Moreover, I am concerned with what it even means to refer to women’s screen voices as embodied or disembodied in a cultural environment so characterized by bleeding boundaries and transmedia storytelling. Indeed, the remediation of one vocal recording in another format can frequently reverse these categories, as when separating the voice from the image of the body that produced it. This point recalls Rick Altman’s famed conception of cinema as a form of ventriloquism, reliant on illusions provided by the constructed cohesion of separate sound and image tracks.²³

In this landscape of remixed sounds and images, the soundtrack or vocal track is increasingly separated from its audiovisual format.²⁴ Analog films that were first redistributed on VHS, DVD, or Blu-Ray are ripped and uploaded as torrents that leave them vulnerable to all kinds of digital remixing and redistribution. If you’re a well-known screen performer, at some stage in this process your voice (its natural sound and its recording and subsequent editing) will likely be dislocated and sent in a new direction—perhaps even ghosting a GIF or a meme that no one can technically hear. In these cases, the memory of what you said and how you said it lives on in subtitles or bold macro meme text. As even the term ripping suggests, visceral dislocations can take place in the process—from the analog to the digital—of the voice from the body to which it was once sutured, with significant implications for how the woman’s voice and the body that produced it are experienced. What do these vocal permutations mean for the voices of female characters and performers? How and why do their voices circulate or resonate in the digital era of Twitter echo chambers and viral podcasts? And what are the ramifications for women, whose screen voices have historically been so tied to their visible bodies?

If you’re the actress Alicia Silverstone, this can mean that, twenty-two years after Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995), memes of your character’s speech might be used to critique President Donald Trump’s restrictive immigration policies. If you’re the actress Anna Faris, it can mean that your relationship podcast, Unqualified (2015–), can suddenly land you with an adjunct teaching post at the University of Southern California, a kind of cultural prestige not exactly associated with Faris’s screen roles.²⁵ Faris’s visible body is cast off from her voice on the podcast, but people recognize her without it. If you’re the actress Margot Robbie, then a press junket might now involve recording an entire interview for the fashion magazine W in sotto voce, with the aim of pleasing the rapidly growing community of ASMR fans.²⁶ The description of this interview on YouTube links Robbie’s performance of ASMR stimuli to her earlier, sexualized performances in films like The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013) and The Big Short (Adam McKay, 2015). Such intertextual references to Robbie’s bombshell persona—one that she herself downplays—is particularly insidious given that Robbie took part in the W video segment without even understanding what ASMR was.

In each of these examples, the actress’s voice was overdetermined, signifying more than your average human voice, but in ways that are not necessarily empowering or authoritative for the woman in question. And while each of the above-mentioned women sounds very different (in terms of pitch, accent, and timbre), the bodies that produce the voices look relatively similar. They represent diversity as only a group of differing shades of attractive, youngish, blonde women can. Is it ultimately the similarity of their bodies that facilitates the diverse uses of their distinct voices, shrinking the available sonic space for other women, particularly women of color, and women with less conventionally desirable bodies and/or voices? This tendency for the voices of white women to dominate diverse digital spaces will be considered in subsequent chapters: in relation to the voice-activated assistants and their representation in cinema in chapter 2; in terms of voice-overs and podcasts in chapters 3 and 4; and in reference to subtitled memes and GIFs in chapter 5. Fortunately, there are exceptions, including popular podcasts by women of color and, as explored in chapter 6, the renegotiation of the weighty concept of the maternal voice by the Black drag queen RuPaul.

VOCAL SHARDS AND SPECTROGRAMS

In the transmedial digital landscape, Sjogren’s metaphor of the vocal vortex gains very tangible form in a 360-degree music video featuring Icelandic performer and artist Björk. Mouth Mantra (2015) was filmed inside a four-foot 3D replica of the pioneering artist’s mouth and exhibited via virtual reality headset as part of the 2016 Björk Digital exhibition in London’s Somerset House. Writer Aurora Mitchell, who interviewed the director, Jesse Kanda, highlighted the unnerving experience of being surrounded by such a singing mouth: The fuchsia insides of a pulsating mouth are staring back at me, sharp, shadowy white teeth warping and rotating with the surrounding flesh. Specks of saliva are dotted around, glistening with a fierce sheen.²⁷ Even in 2D format, the experience of watching the rapid distortions of this mouth could aptly be described as entering into a vortex (attaching new prescience to Sjogren’s 2006 book title in the process) (figure 0.4). But unlike our previous examples, the presentation of Björk’s voice is not sexualized, instead signaling toward the potential of more recent screen formats to present women’s voices in ways that are increasingly immersive and graphic, even verging on the grotesque. In the hands of Björk, a multimodal artist and technological pioneer, digital innovations can thus be harnessed to provide a rendering of the source of a female voice that is, quite literally, well rounded.

Figure 0.4. Screenshot from Björk’s virtual reality music video Mouth Mantra, 2015, directed by Jesse Kanda.

The vocal vortex is not the only hermeneutic from early scholarship on the female screen voice that is capable of shedding light on the more contemporary digital mediascape. The Echo and Narcissus of Amy Lawrence’s book title, Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema, also gain new meaning in relation to women’s digital screen voices. Retellings of Ovid’s tale from the Metamorphoses tend to focus on Narcissus, the young hunter who rejected Echo (although he is better known for drowning in a pool because he was so absorbed in his own reflection). Lawrence, however, refocuses attention on the nymph Echo, who loses her power to speak freely when the goddess Hera curses her; thereafter, she can only repeat the last few words that have most recently been said to her. Lawrence reminds us that the story interweaves issues of sight and sound, vision and speech. She perceptively compares Echo’s fragmented and derivative speech to cinema’s representational qualities: "Like the reflection [of Narcissus] in the pool, an echo is defined by a fundamental absence: what we perceive is not an entity but an illusion, the reflection of what once was. . . . In cinema, everything we hear and everything we see isn’t there anymore. It is an echo and a reflection. The pleasures of the fundamental absence, or echo, are inevitably linked to gender issues, in that the various technologies used to reproduce the illusion of the live voice across history have sought to recreate men and women according to the standards of the day."²⁸ What is so interesting, from the perspective of the digital era, is how the standards of the day may have largely stayed the same for at least a century, but all the while, the gendered dynamics of the mediated echo were being radically altered. This contrast, I would argue, is largely a result of the proliferation of screen technologies.

Lawrence explained that an entire philosophy of Victorian gender relations can be read in the praises of the first telephone operators. Even here, the dulcet tones of the women’s voices seem[ed] to exercise a soothing and calming effect upon the masculine mind.²⁹ Both these tones and their effects are strikingly similar to YouTube’s calming ASMR chorus of whispering women. And yet, as subsequent chapters will reveal, the mechanisms by which a female voice echoes have changed. While Ovid’s Echo was able to repeat only the last few words that were said to her, her twenty-first-century counterparts are much more likely to have their own words repeated ad infinitum across digital platforms and formats (GIFs, YouTube videos, podcasts, glitch videos, and televisual lip syncs), as already signaled by the frequent references to social media echo chambers.³⁰ Indeed, to revisit Silverman’s focus on the acoustic mirror, I wish to propose a new functioning for this symbolic description: if this term captures the female voice as it relates to psychoanalysis and classical Hollywood cinema, then in the twenty-first century this acoustic mirror has been shattered, dispersing vocal shards across a much broader range of screens.

Silverman’s acoustic mirror is grounded in psychoanalytic theories of language and subjectivity, most notably those of Jacques Lacan and Guy Rosolato. The acoustic mirror is mapped onto Lacan’s conception of the mirror stage: the maternal voice introducing the child to its mirror reflection, and the child’s initiation into speech based on imitation of the mother’s sounds.³¹ Rather jarringly, from my contemporary sound studies perspective, such analyses make no reference to the very real acoustic mirrors developed in Britain in the early twentieth century. These huge concrete structures were built to provide early detection of aerial attacks in wartime by reflecting sound waves. Dating from the 1920s and 1930s, the mirrors—sometimes referred to as listening ears—were divided into two types of devices: (1) concave bowls (with a diameter of 20–30 feet), from which sound was detected using a collector wearing a stethoscope-type device, and (2) acoustic walls measuring some two hundred feet in length, from which sound was collected by an arrangement of microphones, and fed by wire to a control room.³² Though soon usurped by radar in terms of an early warning system, most of these acoustic mirrors still stand, giant testaments to the potential of early sound technologies. They strike me as important reminders that, for psychoanalysts, tangible phenomena are too often discarded as threats to the abstract ideal. Thus there was no acknowledgment of these technologies in Silverman’s book of the same name, despite the technology’s precedence by some sixty years. Technology, then, has always been central to the concept of the acoustic mirror, even if it was discounted entirely from the corresponding film theory. Technology seems even more central to twenty-first-century approaches to the screen, where multiple, often distorted echoes of women’s voices reverberate across screens in digital space. And much as the sound walls depended on a system of microphones, feeding noises from the wider atmosphere into a control room through a system of wires, digital screen voices are collected and reflected through a network system that allows vocal shards from cinema’s shattered acoustic mirror to disperse across many different screens.

The parallels and distortions between women’s traditional and digital screen voices are likely unsurprising to literary scholar Steven Connor, who noted that the technologies of the voice are actualizations of fantasies and desires concerning the voice which predate the actual technologies.³³ In the same way, in this book I do not disregard existing theories of the screen voice based in analog media. Various historical examples can instead be considered important precursors to the digital formats under discussion here, such as classical Hollywood actresses’ vocal performances on the radio, or audio guides to museums delivered by the voices of famous women and used to draw visitors into cultural exhibitions. Though the screen is absent from both setups, it is on screen that these women’s voices gained the gravitas to be heard in more diverse cultural spaces. For instance, in keeping with Connor’s assertion, post-synchronization technologies used to dub women in classical Hollywood have given way to digital tools that can alter the woman’s voice (and its relationship to her body) in new ways.

Earlier scholars of the film voice have cited the difficulty of capturing the specifics of vocal timbre and inflection using written analysis, yet audio software packages can now make these qualities more tangible by transcodifying them into visual formats.³⁴ The voice, once visualized, can offer confirmation of impressions already produced sonically, much as eye-tracking software is increasingly used to confirm and revise long-held assumptions about the gaze patterns of viewers. In fact, some more digitally oriented approaches to the female voice involve the screen as a tool for vocal analysis. In order to trace the evolution of women’s battle cries in video games, for example, Milena Droumeva used Adobe Audition’s sound visualization tools, identifying a troubling increase in the number and duration of cries from female avatars (see figure 0.5) as well as other changes.³⁵ As the spectrograms of these women’s battle cries help reveal, digital screens and the related technologies not only offer new ways to experience the voice, but also new ways to understand it, including its complex gendered properties.³⁶

Figure 0.5. A spectrogram analysis of battle cries in Soul Calibur, from a research project on women’s voices in video games by Milena Droumeva, Kaeleigh Evans, Nesan Furtado, and Renita Bangert titled It Gets Worse . . . the Female Voice in Video Games, published in First Person Scholar, November 2017.

The chapters that follow discuss several other factors that influence the representation, reception, and remediation of women’s voices across screen media in the digital era. These include an increased focused on identity politics related to gender, sexuality, and race as well as trends in digital culture toward more participatory approaches to making and remixing media content.³⁷ Such dynamics are often underpinned by the industrial and fannish workings of stardom. My approach complements that of Mary Desjardins, who in her book Recycled Stars: Female Film Stardom in the Age of Television and Video focused on recycled star images. I instead highlight how female film stars’ voices can be recycled according to such a cultural logic.³⁸ For even though non-famous women are involved in digital incarnations of the technologized voice, there is a notable pattern for well-known actresses to be pulled into these trends, a vortex over which they have little control. Their famous bodies and/or