This workshop aims at an examination of the cultural practice of gender attribution to voices. At the beginning I will play back a collage of snippets of songs performed by various singers and ask the participants to do something they have to do every day several times: classify the voices they hear as either “female” or “male”. Building on the experience with this exercise we will examine our notions of gender and voice and discuss the regulatory practices involved in gender attribution.

Here are some possible questions we might address: Which assumptions about a singer or speaker do we mobilize when we are asked to attribute gender to voices? How do we know whether an attribution is correct or not? What is "voice", what is "gender" and how are these concepts related (for us and/or in our disciplines)? Can we assume that we are born with a “sexed voice” and that the voice operates as “a stethoscope … leaking information about our biological, psychological, and social status” (Karpf 2006, 10) or are there indications that make us question this taken-for-granted perspective? What does it mean if gender and voice are theorized as “performative events” (see for instance Butler 1988; Kolesch & Krämer 2006; Senelick 1992)? What are the consequences of the different concepts of voice and gender for clinical, performance, research and everyday practice?

Butler, J. 1988. Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Theatre Journal 40 (4): 519–531.

Karpf, A. 2006. The Human Voice. How this Extraordinary Instrument Reveals Essential Clues about Who We Are. London: Bloomsbury.

Kolesch, D., and S. Krämer. 2006. Stimme. Annäherung an ein Phänomen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Senelick, L. 1992. Gender in Performance. The Presentation of Difference in the Performing Arts. Hanover: University Press of New England.