The Female Voice

By integrating theoretical approaches to the female voice with the musicological investigation of female singers’ practices, the contributors to this volume offer fresh viewpoints on the material, symbolic and cultural aspects of the female voice in the twentieth century. Various styles and genres are covered, including Western art music, experimental composition, popular music, urban folk and jazz. The volume offers a substantial and innovative appraisal of the role of the female voice from the perspective of twentieth-century performance practices, the centrality of female singers’ experimentations and extended vocal techniques along with the process of the ‘subjectivisation’ of the voice.

Focusing on the female voice in public contexts, language and gender specialists consider the barriers and opportunities encountered by women in gaining recognition in politics, law, the church, education, business and the media, where people are increasingly judged by their speech and where male and female speech is often evaluated differently.

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.

In America, comics and comic books have often been associated with adolescent male fantasy--muscle-bound superheroes and scantily clad women. Nonetheless, comics have also been read and enjoyed by girls. While there have been many strong representations of women throughout their history, the comics of today have evolved and matured, becoming a potent medium in which to explore the female experience, particularly that of girlhood and adolescence. In Girls and Their Comics: Finding a Female Voice in Comic Book Narrative, Jacqueline Danziger-Russell contends that comics have a unique place in the representation of female characters. She discusses the overall history of the comic book, paying special attention to girls' comics, showing how such works relate to a female point of view. While examining the concept of visual literacy, Danziger-Russell asserts that comics are an excellent space in which the marginalized voices of girls may be expressed. This volume also includes a chapter on manga (Japanese comics), which explains the genesis of girls' comics in Japan and their popularity with girls in the United States. Including interviews with librarians, comic creators, and girls who read comics and manga, Girls and Their Comics is an important examination of the growing interest in comic books among young females and will appeal to a wide audience, including literary theorists, teachers, librarians, popular culture and women's studies scholars, and comic book historians.

A complete step-by-step guide, Secrets of Singing provides everything needed to gain technical and musical vocal mastery. Some of the highlights include: basic principles of singing, mastery of the upper voice, achieving the power of an open throat, and phrasing and diction on a professional level. The package contains two CDs (one for high voice and one for low voice) and an almost 400-page information-packed book.

This study illuminates the female voice as a means of signalling resistance to tyranny in early Stuart literature and discourse.

The study takes the received view among scholars that women in the Middle Ages were faced with sustained misogyny and that their voices were seldom heard in public and subjects it to a critical analysis. The ten chapters deal with various aspects of the question, and the voices of a variety of authors - both female and male - are heard. The study opens with an enquiry into violence against women, including in texts by male writers (Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Straßburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach) which indeed describe instances of violence, but adopt an extremely critical stance towards them. It then proceeds to show how women were able to develop an independent identity in various genres and could present themselves as authorities in the public eye. Mystic texts by Hildegard of Bingen, Marie de France and Margery Kempe, the medieval conduct poem known as Die Winsbeckin, the Devout Books of Sisters composed in convents in South-West Germany, but also quasi-historical documents such as the memoirs of Helene Kottaner or Anna Weckerin's cookery book, demonstrate that far more women were in the public gaze than had hitherto been assumed and that they possessed the self-confidence to establish their positions with their intellectual and their literary achievements.

The female voice plays a more central role in Sufi ritual, especially in the singing of devotional poetry, than in almost any other area of Muslim culture. Female singers perform sufiana-kalam, or mystical poetry, at Sufi shrines and in concerts, folk festivals, and domestic life, while male singers assume the female voice when singing the myths of heroines in qawwali and sufiana-kalam. Yet, despite the centrality of the female voice in Sufi practice throughout South Asia and the Middle East, it has received little scholarly attention and is largely unknown in the West. This book presents the first in-depth study of the female voice in Sufi practice in the subcontinent of Pakistan and India. Shemeem Burney Abbas investigates the rituals at the Sufi shrines and looks at women's participation in them, as well as male performers' use of the female voice. The strengths of the book are her use of interviews with both prominent and grassroots female and male musicians and her transliteration of audio- and videotaped performances. Through them, she draws vital connections between oral culture and the written Sufi poetry that the musicians sing for their audiences. This research clarifies why the female voice is so important in Sufi practice and underscores the many contributions of women to Sufism and its rituals.