Towards a feminist medium of sound: Situated meanings in late 20th-century sound practices

I compare two cases of performative practices that emerged in the late 20th century through a mixed lens that combines new materialist philosophy and feminist media theory. I engage with Annie Goh’s new materialist feminist understanding of sound as a material-semiotic actor, capable of both receiving and generating meaning. To address new materialism’s tendency to produce an idealised model of materiality that overlooks media objects and practices, I articulate this proposal by considering sound as a feminist medium, engaging with feminist media scholarship’s accounts of diverse experiences of technological engagement that include forms of resistance. To this end, I introduce situated sound sources as a framework that theorises feminist explorations of unconcealed, sound-producing objects in performance contexts. Applying this combined lens, I examine the lack of representation of women artists whose practices incorporate performance within the historicisation of sound art, contextualising this disregard in relation to diverse late 20th-century approaches to the materiality of sound and showing how materialist conceptions of the sonic medium are challenged through the meaning-making practices explored in works by women performers and sound artists. Drawing on feminist media theorists Brooke Erin Duffy and Jeremy Packer’s understanding of technologies of containment as devices that extend inwards rather than outwards, thereby reworking the relationship between bodies and technologies, I consider situated sound sources as containment technologies deployed within sound practices. I compare John Cage’s Water Walk and Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen to describe situated sound sources as devices that examine sound’s agency in performance and offer critical and embodied affordances for developing a feminist medium of sound.