#Female Voice

[haggishlyhagging]

Most often ideas come to me when I am alone, in complete silence. I hear ideas in my head moving. I love being alone to grasp my inner voice. This tendency has caused me trouble with people around me. My second husband became suspicious if I left our bed to be alone. When he saw me writing he wanted to read what I wrote. I had to hide my writing in a secret place. He thought I was in love with another man. I tried to convince him that I was writing fiction but he could not understand. At last he came to me and said, 'Me or your writing, you have to choose.'

I chose my writing and left him. The pleasure of writing to me is more than sexual pleasure, more than any pleasure. Writing is essential to my life, like breathing. I can live without a husband but I cannot live without writing. By writing I become one with the world and with myself.

-Nawal El Saadawi, “How to Write and Why” in The Essential Nawal El Saadawi: A Reader

[abitbrokenpoetry]

I had declared war on myself.. Bloody battles raging for years.. I sat in the middle of the killing fields.. savage; dirty weapons in hand.. victims lying around me.. but deep down I was broken.. people would come& they would go.. & I barely noticed them.. until you came wondering in my path.. you crawled through the landmines.. & dodged my grenades.. & you patiently sat with me as things exploded.. you were fighting your own battles.. you gave me your coat.. and wiped away my tears for awhile.. & it wasn’t nearly so lonely there anymore.. I never thanked you for that.. for keeping my company.. when I was trying so desperately to destroy myself.. I hope wherever you are now.. you have fought all your battles.. & won your war.

[auntbibby]

i made a 60-second guide to doing a girl voice for my younger transfemms:

i hope it helps u. special thanks to @transvoicelessons on youtube.

[blackmarket-playlists]

New playlist on Spotify - the only one with new female/ male rock and shoegaze duos!

According to my research, this is the only playlist on Spotify with current female/male rock and shoegaze duos. No one-off duets but "real" 2-piece bands! Terrific, stunning, awesome - these "couples" rock like hell or take us to other spheres. Current songs only, updated regulary. On the playlist cover you can see the wonderful FALSE LEFTY from UK/Germany: Three drums, three guitar strings - what you can do with them is more than great and intoxicating. The photo for the cover was taken by Holger Nitschke.

Genres: Alt. and indie-rock, shoegaze, metal. Check it out and give it a spin.

[ewooxyjewelry]

Sterling Silver Rings @ www.ewooxy.com

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[hebeandersen]

Female choir kids, I have a question for you:

If you vote, please reblog: I really want to know the result, since I still sing in a choir! Also, write in the tag your answer if you vote other ❤️

[cat-eye-nebula]

❤ BLISS - Kissing (New Version with Beach Waves) ❤

(Downtempo, Café del Mar)

[twomie]

Hiya!

Are you looking for a voice for your project? My name is Matilda Dahlén and I'm a professionally educated musical theatre artist eager to join projects where I can voice act and sing. I'm also doing voice overs for ads, audio books and other informational voices. I've just started out, but I'm already getting five star reviews, so if you have a project in mind, I'd be happy to help out :) Send me a message through my Fiverr gig, and I'll guarantee quick answers and a quick, quality delivery! As a new up-and-coming voice actor, any help boosting this post would be really apprciated, thank you!! Love, Matilda

[adriannamateo]

It's a double bill :)) I'm performing TONIGHT, 2 May 2024, at LINCOLN CENTER! I'm acting, singing a song by Rocky Duval, and playing violin in "Hildegard, Reborn" at Bruno Walter Auditorium, 111 Amsterdam Ave., 6:00PM. Free admission (just show up :). And...

I'm performing FRIDAY, 3 May 2024, at PAC NYC! I'm singing original songs at 5PM and 7:45PM at NYC's newest, hippest downtown venue. Free admission (just show up :).

[haggishlyhagging]

The images of woman as object, not as active agent or creative autonomous subject, ensure that women remain on the outside, that women's voices are not heard. As history describes the doings of men, as fine art is the art created by men, as literature is writing produced by men, and as classical music is that composed by men, so the science, the news, the art, the literature, the music of today is that produced by men. The patriarchs are adamant that this should be so. The conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham, pronounced, “There are no women composers, never have been, and never will be.” John Ruskin confidently declared “No woman can paint.” And Swinburne claimed that, “When it comes to science we find women are simply nowhere. The feminine mind is quite unscientific.” Virginia Woolf's ponderings on the (im)possibility of ‘Shakespeare's sister’ who might have wanted to write, characterize the position of women in the creative sphere. As Tillie Olsen illustrates, in her now classic text, Silences, woman's voice has been absent from the world's creative arena for centuries. Unfortunately, it seems as if it still is.

But why are women so silent in the scientific, professional or creative spheres of life? The traditional reductionist argument, rehearsed earlier, is that women are somehow unable to think, to paint, or to write because of affinity with nature and lack of intellect. Or is it rather that we are not allowed to, through the systematic exclusion of women's work in the public sphere, or through the maintenance of women's work in the home the maintaining of women as servers, as the 'angel in the house', rather than as active creators of artistic discourse? Is it that women are producing creative material, but it is being systematically ignored? For there are many who profit from the reification of the male creator and the simultaneous reduction of women's creativity to the sphere of childbirth, as this extract from a misogynistic male critic illustrates:

A few years back I read a neo-feminist's approving review of another neo-feminist's book. The reviewer said that she agreed with the author that for a woman, a career is more creative than being a mother. That puzzled me: without having given much thought to it, I had assumed that about the closest the human race can get to creation is when a woman bears a child, nurtures him, and cares for him [sic]. (Himmelfarb, 1967: 59; my emphasis)

If women can believe that childbirth is unsurpassable as a creative act, perhaps they will put down their pens and their paints, cease thinking and continue breeding. Is it a coincidence that the male pronoun is used to refer to the product of female creativity? Is it as creative to produce a female child? Or is this yet another comment produced without having given much thought to it?

The reason for women's absence on the world stage of creativity is not biological inferiority, nor an absence of desire to create beyond the realms of the family. The real reasons for the silence are not very difficult to discern; nor are the effects. Take the case of art, as many feminist scholars recently have, rewriting the history of art through a feminist prism. Our Old Masters and masterpieces - the art which fetches astronomical prices, elevating the artist to an almost godlike status, his creativity seen to be drawn from some higher power - are all the work of men. The history of art is peopled with men, not women. The male artist is the hero; the female artist is invisible. The woman is present only as the object of the artist's gaze, to be consumed, to be frozen and framed, to be possessed. Feminist analysis has identified the way in which women's voices and women as active agents have been suppressed; the way in which women are destined 'to be spoken' (in Lacanian terms) rather than to speak. It is the same process that silences talent, as recent texts on the 'forgotten' women artists, scientists, or authors has shown. It is produced by a systematic suppression - a systematic oppression - achieved by promoting and validating the work of men whilst ignoring, or denying the existence of, the work of women.

Whilst women writers from Aphra Behn to Mary Wollstonecraft have been rediscovered by feminist literary scholars and feminist publishers, many others have not. Many women never had the time or opportunity to publish - and their voices will never be heard. Many women remain silent, following in the painful footsteps of our foremothers who never have the time or legitimacy for reflection and creation. It is moving to consider how many brilliant voices have not been heard, how many brilliant careers have been thwarted. As Olive Schreiner reflected:

What has humanity not lost by suppression and subjection? We have a Shakespeare; but what of the possible Shakespeares we might have had who passed their life from youth upward brewing currant wine and making pastries for fat country squires to eat, with no glimpse of freedom of the life and action necessary even to poach on deer in the green forests; stifled out without one line written, simply because of being the weaker sex, life gave no room for action and grasp on life?

In addition to marginalizing women, and ensuring that we cannot find a voice with which to declare our anger, our desperation, or our fears, the images can be seen to have a more invidious function in that they objectify women. They ensure that we have few role models to turn to for inspiration. We expect to be confined and constricted. We expect to serve men. Is it any wonder that we despair, that we cry out, that we are mad? And if the woman herself was not treated as mad for daring to be creative, she may have been driven so by the restrictions upon her. It is an insidious double bind: women who do attempt to create may be vilified for their talent, and for their temerity in daring to speak out. Whether a woman's creativity is an expression of inner conflict and turmoil, or merely a desire for self-expression, it is in danger of becoming the tool which condemns, a centuries-old process, as Virginia Woolf eloquently shows:

.. any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty. (Woolf, 1928: 48)

The feminist martyrs, diagnosed as mad, 'treated' by patriarchal experts, and (often) destroyed by their own hands, have fuelled arguments that madness is protest, an expression of thwarted creativity. And within a culture which refuses to recognize women's creativity (except in the area of motherhood) it is argued that its frustration leads to madness. Phyllis Chesler opens her book, Women and madness, with a testimonial to four such women, Elizabeth Packard, Ellen West, Zelda Fitzgerald and Sylvia Plath. In her description of their madness as 'an expression of female powerlessness and an unsuccessful attempt to reject and overcome this state', Chesler argues that the experiences of these women symbolize the oppression of women's power, women's creativity - an oppression with fatal consequences (Chesler, 1972: 16). Her argument - that the inability of these women to express themselves, their silencing by men, has led to their madness and their suicide - has obviously struck a chord in the hearts and minds of many women. Their icons and heroines are women like Sylvia Plath, women seen as victims of the individual men who thwarted their intellect, as well as victims of a society which sees women, not as active subjects, but as objects. When we read Plath's words, ‘Dying/Is an art, like everything else./I do it exceptionally well,’ a chill hand clutches the heart: although many would like to emulate her creativity, they fear the fate that befell her. We must, however, be careful not to glorify these women, raising them to the status of martyrs, for, as Tillie Olsen demonstrates, suicide is rare among creative women. What is undoubtedly more common is the slow creeping frustration, the inability to think, to breathe, to work at anything other than the daily grind. For women's creativity is not frustrated only by the structural barriers provided by the male-dominated academies and universities, and the male publishing houses, but also by the lack of time. For if male writers such as Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Joseph Conrad can share this experience described by Conrad, how must it be for the woman whose main task is the care of her children, her husband, her home?

I sit down religiously each morning, I sit down for eight hours, and the sitting down is all. In the course of that working day of eight hours I write three sentences which I erase before leaving the table in despair.

It is no coincidence that 'in our century as in the last, until very recently, all distinguished achievement has come from childless women' (Olsen, 1978: 31). How many women can find time to await the visit of the muse in moments snatched between children and housework? It is a wonder that Jane Austen managed to write - hiding her papers under a blotter in her parsonage drawing room - by snatching a few lines, a few thoughts, when the scarce moments of solitude were upon her. How many others must have given up, despairing, angry and defeated?

Even those women who manage to ward off the angel in the house, and can find a room of their own, may be remembered chiefly for aspects of their personal lives, their work forgotten, and their creativity reduced to voyeuristic intrusions on their sexuality. As French says:

Whether a woman had a sex life, what sort of sex life it was, whether she married, whether she was a good wife or a good mother, are questions that often dominate critical assessment of female artists, writers and thinkers. (French, 1985: 97)

The critics who pore over men's work with an academic glee, hardly noticing their personal lives, seem unnaturally interested in the woman creator's personal habits and especially in her sexuality. This allows the creative woman to be presented as unbalanced, unnatural, and certainly not representative of women. Thus, 'Harriet Martineau is portrayed as a crank, Christabel Pankhurst as a prude, Aphra Behn as a whore, Mary Wollstonecraft as promiscuous' (Spender, 1982: 31). Sylvia Plath, one of the foremost creative women of the late twentieth century, has been similarly treated. Biographers, commentators and critics seem more interested in her adolescent sexuality, her relationships with men during her college years, and her marriage, than with her work.

That a woman who produced brilliant poetry could also be sexual is seen to be a peculiarity. That she killed herself allows her to be seen as mad, and thus as not a normal woman. This over-concern with her sexuality and sanity detracts from her work, and is an insult to this gifted poet, and to others who might follow her. The message to women is clear - dabble with the muse, attempt to enter the male world of learning, of thinking, of creativity, and you may pay the highest price.

-Jane Ussher, Women’s Madness: Misogyny or Mental Illness?

[abitbrokenpoetry]

You’re dangling off the edge of that mountain.. panic stricken.. desperate.. and you’re grasping for hands of people who don’t care enough to pull you up.. they never have.. just let go.. you will shatter on the rocks at the bottom.. it will hurt.. but then you will be able to gather up all the pieces of yourself and weld them back together however you want… so let go.. there’s such beauty in the fall.

[blackmarket-playlists]

EXCITING NEW FEMALE ARTISTS ON THE RISE: WOMEN OF POP • INDIE-POP 💥 COVER: CONNIE MILES

[ewooxyjewelry]

Sterling Silver and Natural Pearls Earrings~ @ www.ewooxy.com

[cruel-nature-records]

OUT TODAY

eleOnora ‘tuuljamuud’

https://cruelnaturerecordings.bandcamp.com/album/tuuljamuud

‘tuuljamuud’ is a collection of meditative voice abstractions created at different locations over a 13 year period. Although the recordings were made separately, collectively they form a cohesive hypnotic body of work that displays a stark raw & hauntingly primitive beauty.

eleOnora (Eleonora Kampe) is an Estonian-Latvian singer and avant-garde vocalist. She works both as a solo artist and in collaborative projects that include noise and ambience duo the Road To Saturn, static abstractions project Tencu/eleOnora and the avant blues experimental group Ringhold

“taking the listener on a new spiritual plane.” Sun 13

[melancholygirl111]

[theabigailthorn]

"Good" Acting

i have a theory that a lot of people say acting is "good" when they're emotionally moved by it, and a lot of cishet white people have a lifelong habit of not listening or empathising when minoritised people speak, so minority actors get called "bad" even when they display some pretty fucking amazing technical skill