Sound, Gender, and the Thing: Earphone and Miss Earphone in Shanghai Cinema, 1939–1949

Abstract This article argues that the earphone is a microcosm of the broader material and societal changes that occurred within the film translation industry in Republican Shanghai. As one of the acoustic devices that shaped the transmission and consumption of sounds in the modern world, the earphone was introduced to Shanghai cinema in 1939 to interpret Western sound films for Chinese audiences. The application of earphones gave rise to a new profession, “Miss Earphone,” whose practitioners were exclusively female, thereby precipitating a counteraction to the male-dominated print translation industry. Such an abrupt transformation brings to the fore the role of the earphone in mediating the entanglement of media, gender, and language. Through the prism of thing theory, this article recognizes the earphone as not only a technical object that assisted the translation enterprise but also a thing through which a rehistoriography could be undertaken concerning media development, the gendering of the labor force, and the remolding of mass entertainment. Correspondingly, within the purview of this essay is not only the human-machine interplay but also the illocutionary force of the earphone in articulating the (re)formation of the human-object relationship within a larger circuit of material development. The thingness of the earphone is, as this article argues, intrinsically inherent in the cross-linguistic endeavors of Shanghai cinema and invariably conditioned by the dynamic interactions between the nonhuman—mediums and techniques—and the human—genders, bodies, senses, and affects.