Published Papers by Amanda Greer
Sound Studies, 2017
The female voice in cinema has been discussed throughout film sound theory as persistently de-aco... more The female voice in cinema has been discussed throughout film sound theory as persistently de-acousmatised, denied the power of narrative creation and relegated to onscreen, visual space. This paper will contrast this visual containment of female vocalisations with that of the female-hosted podcast, in which nothing is or can be seen. The podcast offers alternative routes of resistance for the female acousmetre, allowing her to maintain her disembodied status. This is poignantly evident in the popular true crime podcast, My Favorite Murder, in which the acousmatic female hosts counter crime film and television's reliance on images of violated female bodies with purely aural recountings. Through their anti-ocularcentric reliance on the aurally evocative, rather than the visually manifested, these female voices transform themselves and the victims of their discussions into haunting spectres that force listeners to imaginatively reconstruct scenes of female-directed violence, while acknowledging the ethics of their complicity in the propagation and popularisation of these narratives. Thus, the true crime podcast is one potential site of doubled resistance against the de-acousmatisation of female voices and the visualisation of mutilated female bodies; this resistance leads to an ethics of the spectral, a Derridean mourning without end. Seeing/not-seeing "To see or not to see the sound's source: it all begins here", Michel Chion writes in the prologue to his canonical work of film sound theory, The Voice in Cinema (1999, 4). This play of visuality, the oscillation between seeing and not-seeing, which corresponds to the ocular-centric binary of knowing and not-knowing, has come to dominate subsequent discussions of film sound. This beginning, the seeing or not-seeing, builds to Chion's cornerstone concept of the acousmetre, "a kind of talking and acting shadow" to which we cannot attribute a body (1999, 21). The acousmetre has power over the listener-viewer, the power of its own self-knowledge , control over its own revelation. In Chion's words, the acousmetre is "an invitation to the loss of the self, to desire and fascination". It is omniscient, panoptic, ubiquitous and omnipotent (24). Thus, in cinema, the acousmetre as a disembodied voice both frustrates and titillates the viewer. It comes as no surprise, then, that the act of de-acousmatisation,
The Journal of American Culture, 2016
The New Review of Film and Television, 2017
Contemporary crime television in the early twenty-first century demonstrates a fixation with mate... more Contemporary crime television in the early twenty-first century demonstrates a fixation with maternal identities relating to professional, working women. Its writers, their protagonists and supporting characters, have become obsessed with maternal ambivalence, specifically, conflicting feelings of love and hate that mothers feel toward their children. Since motherhood is not simply an unquestionable part of female identity, but an institution naturalized through dominant patriarchal structures, the female investigator figure in crime TV is a particularly rich subject in the exploration of maternal ambivalence and how it plays out in crime TV representation of motherhood. Close examination of Broadchurch, Happy Valley, and The Fall, featuring strong maternal (or staunchly non-maternal) figures, demonstrates the professional-domestic conflation in the female investigator figure, using several maternal character tropes (e.g. grieving mother, Mama Bear), to effectively explore, stabilize, and even vilify maternal ambivalence. While certain programs condemn the professional woman as a neglectful mother, others allow for a more nuanced exploration of maternal ambivalence, treating maternal identity as a complex and imposing abstraction. These programs' exploration of the female investigator suggests what it means to mother in a world where women are expected to juggle and navigate between numerous identities with ease and grace.
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Published Papers by Amanda Greer