Women's Voices in Digital Media : The Sonic Screen from Film to Memes

In today’s digital era, women’s voices are heard everywhere—from smart home devices to social media platforms, virtual reality, podcasts, and even memes—but these new forms of communication are often accompanied by dated gender politics. In __Women’s Voices in Digital Media__, Jennifer O’Meara dives into new and well-established media formats to show how contemporary screen media and cultural practices police and fetishize women’s voices, but also provide exciting new ways to amplify and empower them. As she travels through the digital world, O’Meara discovers newly acknowledged—or newly erased—female voice actors from classic films on YouTube, meets the AI and digital avatars in __Her__ and __The Congress__, and hears women’s voices being disembodied in new ways via podcasts and VR voice-overs. She engages with dialogue that is spreading with only the memory of a voice, looking at how popular media like __Clueless__ and __The Simpsons__ have been mined for feminist memes, and encounters vocal ventriloquism on __RuPaul’s Drag Race__ that queers and valorizes the female voice. Through these detailed case studies, O’Meara argues that the digital proliferation of screens alters the reception of sounds as much as that of images, with substantial implications for women’s voices. "The popularity of female-voiced virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa has brought renewed attention to the ways that new forms of communication and media have often been accompanied by old-fashioned gender politics and assumptions. In this project, Jennifer O'Meara looks at how women's voices and their meaning are being impacted by digital technologies, both in new media formats and well-established ones, and how female voices from the past are being recycled and reconceived. She argues that these changes, accompanied by shifting ideas about identity, are providing new forms of fetishization and silencing, but also new and more varied possibilities for empowerment. O'Meara analyzes case studies across a wide variety of media to show how the digital era is altering how women's voices are represented in film and TV, 'as well as how their voices increasingly 'travel' in digital spaces'"-- Provided by publisher An examination of the sound and silence of women in digital media.