Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound (review)

Gina Bloom has given her book a brilliantly performative title, with a grammar that simultaneously describes and enacts her subject. Voice in Motion explores the conjunction of materiality (noun) and mobility (verb) in early modern writings about sound. The gerunds in the subtitle signal Bloom’s focus on the dynamics of vocal transmission, particularly when it occurred in the acoustic space of the early modern theater. The comma that links “shaping sound” to “staging gender” further adumbrates a critical connection between vocal performance and the performance of gender. To articulate that connection is the project of her study. Drawing on a range of early modern texts—scientific, medical, religious, grammatical, and musical—Bloom proposes to reconstruct an early modern theory of the human voice as “crafted air” or “shaped sound” (2), possessing its own temporal and spatial life apart from the body in which it originated. Thus, when Bloom writes of “voice in motion,” she means it literally.

In her introduction, Bloom takes issue with the tendency of contemporary materialist scholarship to “limit ‘matter’ to visible and tangible realms” (5), arguing that voice also has a “specific material form, whose modes of production, transmission, and reception need to be historicized and theorized” (15). This revisionist materialism further differentiates Bloom’s approach from speech-act theory, conversation analysis, and rhetorical analysis, which are concerned with the construction of social relationships, authority, and power through language. Instead, Bloom seeks to discover how, for early moderns, “authority and power [were] imagined to inhere (or fail to inhere) in the material attributes of the voice” (3). As a primary site of vocal performance in early modern England, the theater is an “ideal laboratory” for Bloom’s investigations (103). Her focus is on the voice of the actor, which exists “at the nexus of the verbal and the concrete” (4). But the actor’s body is only one of the physical sites that give meaning to voice in the theater: Bloom also considers the air through which their voices move, and the work of the audience in receiving and interpreting these vocal transmissions.

The most original of Bloom’s arguments is that what gave voice its power in the early modern imagination was not its material stability, but its volatility: its capacity to detach itself from the speaker and travel through space, following unpredictable and often obstructed trajectories on its way to a receiving ear that could not be counted on to apprehend the original message verbatim. Bloom’s characterization of voice as “inherently unmanageable vocal matter” becomes the ground for articulating a “new model of vocal agency that benefits those whose expressive acts were curtailed or marginalized” (6). She is especially interested in “how early modern representations of the voice as unruly matter generate resistance to early modern hierarchies of gender” (6). “Shaping sound” and “staging gender” come together most provocatively in Bloom’s challenge to the “undertheorized system of analogies between voice, body, subjectivity, and agency” found in much feminist writing (13). She draws on contemporary poststructuralist scholarship, notably the work of Judith Butler, to move beyond an unproblematic location of the voice in the speaker’s body and show how the authority of an utterance is dispersed and shared in the process of production and reception. But Boom differentiates herself from Butler through her focus on the “practical performance of language” (14), the physical aspects of vocal transmission. She stresses the need to historicize voice by problematizing the equation of speech with power, and silence with oppression, assumed by some contemporary feminist critics when dealing with early modern texts. By focusing instead on the early modern dis-embodying of voice, Bloom is able to advance her counterargument that the further voice moves from body, the less it can be counted on “to perform the speaker’s will and the more voice undermines male investments in vocal control—producing instead unexpectedly robust models of female agency” (17).

The book’s organization parallels...