First chapter draft mitsa

positioning myself in relation to gender binary and sound practice

I write this chapter starting from my own body experience, its sex assignment and its gender transformations throughout the years. Locating myself outside of the gender binary, I am interested in how we embody gender, how bodies get shaped from this embodiment, how human voices can be classified and mapped strictly in relation to gender binary and the human, how sound practices can be situated into systems of control, facilitation, failure or kinship.

My interest for locating sound practices into hierarchies of gender, anthropocentrism, ability starts again from a lived experience: from receiving a middle conservatory training on jazz guitar and being active in jams and music circles of Patras for several years. Although at the moment my research interest is not located into this specific music instrument, genre or practice, being inside (and in the periphery) of this sub-culture shaped my current questions: By experiencing the narrow and excluding ideal of the (cis male) dominant, autonomous, controlling, frontal, genius performer who tames his instrument and has the absolute control on his sound, I started seeing the political connotations of this approach and searching for new ones, more feminist, queer, post-human.

gender embodiment and regulating devices

Bodies and their sex classifications related to power, their trimmings into discrete organs that matter more than others and have specific functions that create hierarchies of meaning between them (Preciado, Kevin Gerry Dunn and Halberstam, 2018) is what I am interested in. I will start from how gender can be traced on bodies and I will continue with locating gender in a broader system of human and non-human power relations. Sound as voice, as speech, as music (Soudant, 2021) and as embodied trace cannot but be part of these power systems, as a media of expression, as a designed product, as a cultural artefact or as a trace of one's existence.

In this research departing from Judith Butler's gender performativity (Butler, 1990), I consider femininity and masculinity as cultural concepts that bodies interpret, as choreographies situated in gendered spaces, as the ways that human bodies relate "with other human, nonhuman, objects, environments and contexts" (Soudant, 2021, p. 336).

Paul B. Preciado in Counter-sexual Manifesto (Preciado, Kevin Gerry Dunn and Halberstam, 2018) writes about the dildo as an apparatus that can deconstruct a stabilised essentialism on the male and female body binary and sexuality. An approach that naturalises the power of the phallus and creates a grouping of sexual organs that are strictly related to a reproduction system. In order to investigate the different ways that the heterosexual norm gets created, he is presenting a genealogy of the vibrator. What is today a sex toy, was introduced in the late 19th century as regulating device for treating the female hysteria, operated first by doctors in medical beds and later by husbands in marriage beds.

A regulating device can be any technology that regulates, that creates and sustains the norm and in that case heteronormativity. Female bodies that were dissidents of their role in the heterosexual household, associated with rejecting their husband's seed and being sexual deviant needed to be controlled and brought back to their reproduction duty as wives and mothers in order to support the domestic and inheritance economy. With this paradoxical practice, the female body orgasm was regulated by the medical and the heterosexual institution of marriage, dislocating and extracting the pleasure of her body, to tune it and associate it with just a mechanical response to the vibrator, operated by his hand. (Preciado, Kevin Gerry Dunn and Halberstam, 2018)