Feminine Voices

WINNER of a silver Foreword INDIES Book of the Year award Are there moments in your life when your femaleness is a source of power or hardship? When does your voice ring its clearest? When have you been silenced? Feminine Rising: Voices of Power and Invisibility brings together international poets and essayists, both award-winning and emergent, to answer these questions with raw, honest meditations that speak to women of all races, nationalities, and sexual orientations. It is an anthology of unforgettable stories both humorous and frightening, inspirational and sensual, employing traditional poetry and prose alongside exciting experimental forms. Feminine Rising celebrates women’s differences, while embracing the source of their sameness—the unique experience of womanhood.

This collection analyzes women’s narratives on the workplace. These narratives speak to the daily struggles women face in the workforce, such as inflexible and long work hours, masculine workplace cultures, employers’ stereotypical attitudes, and the absence of work-life balance initiatives. Viewed from a sociological perspective, the authors emphasize the reoccurring themes of devaluation, exploitation, and dehumanization of female workers resulting from unconscious or implicit bias and which directly impacts women’s quality of life.

The Book, Female Voices In Keats'S Poetry Studies Some Major Women Figures In John Keats'S Poetry In The Light Of Recent Criticism Of Sexual Ambiguity In Keats. Sexual Ambiguity, As Scholars Have Discussed, Refers To The Sexual Identity Or Fragmented Poetic Self As Reflected In John Keats'S Verse. It Examines Some Central Women Characters Of Keatsian Verse In The Light Of This Dual Strand: First, As To How Far These Women Figures Are Projections Of Keats'S Own Poetic Self; And Secondly, What Do They Reveal, As Regards Attitudes Of A Male Poet Towards Women. A Study Of These Women Figures Provides Interesting Observations On Feminine Projections Besides Trying To Correlate The Shaping Of These Attitudes With The Psychological And Biographical Strands Of The Poet'S Life. The Study Of Keatsian Verse Complicates The Issue Of Gender, Has Already Been Highlighted By Recent Criticism. The Book Examines The Female Characters In His Poetry In The Light Of Deeper Conflicts, Complexities And Confusions Within Keats'S Own Poetic Self.

Ewe dance-drumming has been extensively studied throughout the history of ethnomusicology, but up to now there has not been a single study that addresses Ewe female musicians. James Burns redresses this deficiency through a detailed ethnography of a group of female musicians from the Dzigbordi community dance-drumming club from the rural town of Dzodze, located in South-Eastern Ghana. Dzigbordi was specifically chosen because of the author's long association with the group members, and because it is part of a genre known as adekede, or female songs of redress, where women musicians critique gender relations in society. Burns uses audio and video interviews, recordings of rehearsals and performances and detailed collaborative analyses of song texts, dance routines and performance practice to address important methodological shifts in ethnomusicology that outline a more humanistic perspective of music cultures. This perspective encompasses the inter-linkages between history, social processes and individual creative artists. The voices of Dzigbordi women provide us not only with a more complete picture of Ewe music-making, they further allow us to better understand the relationship between culture, social life and individual creativity. The book will therefore appeal to those interested in African Studies, Gender Studies and Oral Literature, as well as ethnomusicology. Includes a DVD documentary.

This book explores how women within the male-dominated Communist Party in the United States built a home for feminist ideology and practice during the early Cold War. It explores how, in articles and petitions, women carefully crafted voices that spoke to the party’s concerns while challenging its theoretical and practical limitations..

The emergence of modernity has typically focused on Western male actors and privileged politics and economy over culture. The contributors to this volume successfully unsettle such perspectives by emphasizing the social history, artistic practices, and symbolic meanings of female performers in popular music of Asia. Women surfaced as popular icons in different guises in different Asian countries through different routes of circulation. Often, these women established prominent careers within colonial conditions, which saw Asian societies in rapid transition and the vernacular and familiar articulated with the novel and the foreign. These female performers were not merely symbols of times that were rapidly changing. Nor were they simply the personification of global historical changes. Female entertainers, positioned at the margins of intersecting fields of activities, created something hitherto unknown: they were artistic pioneers of new music, new cinema, new forms of dance and theater, and new behavior, lifestyles, and morals. They were active agents in the creation of local performance cultures, of a newly emerging mass culture, and the rise of a region-wide and globally oriented entertainment industry. Vamping the Stage is the first book-length study of women, modernity, and popular music in Asia, showcasing cutting-edge research conducted by scholars whose methods and perspectives draw from such diverse fields as anthropology, Asian studies, cultural studies, ethnomusicology, and film studies. Led by an impressive introduction written by Weintraub and Barendregt, fourteen contributors analyze the many ways that women performers supported, challenged, and transgressed representations of existing gendered norms in the entertainment industries of China, Japan, India, Indonesia, Iran, Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Placing women’s voices in social and historical contexts, the essays explore salient discourses, representations, meanings, and politics of “voice” in Asian popular music. Historicizing the artistic sounds, lyrical texts, and visual images of female performers, the essays reveal how women used popular music to shape the ideas, practices, and meanings of modernity in various Asian contexts and time frames. The ascendency of women as performers paralleled, and in some cases generated, developments in wider society such as suffrage, social and sexual liberation, women as business entrepreneurs and independent income earners, and particularly as models for new life styles. Women’s voices, mediated through new technologies of film and the phonograph, changed the soundscape of global popular music and resonate today in all spheres of modern life.

All you ever wanted to know about the female voice but you never dared to ask by the leading world expert, Dr. Jean Abitbol! Enriched with numerous fascinating anecdotes, this exciting book covers the journey of the female voice and its development and impact on others from motherhood to old age. And the journey is full of surprises with answers to fascinating questions. Does voice have a sex? Is that voice sexual or hormonal? Is it genetic or epigenetic? Why do female voices change less at puberty than men’s voices? How does a woman’s voice change during her menstrual cycle? Is the female biological clock still a mystery? How and why is the voice the target of the sexual hormones? What kind of treatments are we using today-from contraceptive pills, hormonal replacement therapy to alternative medicine-that affect the voice and how do they affect it? Is a woman’s voice damaged after the hormonal “earthquake” that takes place when she is in her fifties? Could we avoid or prevent the aging voice in women? What are the specific pathologies affecting the female vocal folds? What are the links between diet, hygiene, and exercise, and how do they affect the female voice? Like a ship on the waves of the sea of life, the female voice, a life-space-time continuum, travels through the winds of emotion and hormonal changes brought about by aging. Dr. Jean Abitbol guides the reader through these changes, mapping the female voice’s journey through life. With his guidance, you will come to see and to understand the emotion, the power, the seduction, the force, and the charm of the female voice and how they converge to make up the female persona.

As a material link between body and culture, self and other, the voice has been endlessly fascinating to artists and critics. Yet it is the voices of women that have inspired the greatest fascination, as well as the deepest ambivalence, because the female voice signifies sexual otherness as well as sexual and cultural power. Embodied Voices explores cultural manifestations of female vocality in the light of current theories of subjectivity, the body and sexual difference. The fourteen essays collected here examine a wide spectrum of discourses, including myth, literature, music, film, psychoanalysis, and critical theory. Though diverse in their critical approaches, the essays are united in their attempt to articulate the compelling yet problematic intersections of gender, voice, and embodiment as they have shaped the textual representation of women and women's self-expression in performance.