Celebrating the 15th anniversary of the Department of Gender Studies and the 20th anniversary of CEU
The Department of Gender Studies proudly presents the lecture series
Voicing Genders, Engendering Voices
“The Embodied Voice: Towards a Feminist Phenomenology of Voice and Vocality”
A public lecture by
Linda Fisher
Associate Professor, Department of Gender Studies
March 7, 2011, 3:30 pm, Auditorium
A feminist phenomenological analysis of voice, rooted in both the feminist understanding of the role of voice in identity, agency, and representation, and the phenomenological thematization of embodied lived experience, leads to a deeper appreciation of the materiality of the voices with which we speak, and their significance in subjective and intersubjective experience. Through an examination of intertwined associations of the feminine, voice, and embodiment, and contrasting examples of the power and immediacy of the corporeal voice and the impaired or lost physical voice, I outline a phenomenology of embodied voice and vocality, with implications for accounts of identity and intersubjectivity, gendered vocality and expressive agency, and an intercorporeality mediated by the living material voice.
Linda Fisher received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Pennsylvania State University. Her research areas include feminist philosophy and gender theory, contemporary Continental philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, philosophy and literature, and aesthetics. She is co-author of Good Reasoning Matters! (2nd ed., OUP, 1997), and co-editor of Feminist Phenomenology (Kluwer, 2000) and Feministische Phänomenologie und Hermeneutik (Königshausen & Neumann, 2005) and has written on Husserl, Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, embodiment, difference, identity and alterity, multiculturalism, and opera. She is currently working on a monograph entitled In Her Own Voice: A Feminist Philosophy of Voice and Vocality, examining vocality as a locus of identity and intersubjectivity.
The Voicing Genders, Engendering Voices lecture series is a joint celebration of the Department’s 15th anniversary and the 20th anniversary of CEU. The lecture series shares our diverse faculty’s most recent research with the wider academic community and showcases the multiple and interdisciplinary ways in which our field contributes to the themes of CEU’s university-wide celebrations: disciplinary self-reflexivity and academia’s social responsibility. Thus our lecture series is intended to contribute to the larger intellectual debates initiated in celebration of CEU’s 20th anniversary.