Artvin
Çoruh University, Artvin, Turkey
Abstract
Since the ancient Greeks, sound
production has been considered to be associated with the quality of voice and
the use of voice under a general rubric of gender. Female voice has often been
thought as an example of deviance from self-control; therefore, a pseudo need
for putting a “door on the female mouth” has been constructed by the
patriarchal culture. Masculinity in this culture defines itself by its
different use of sound, namely the masculine virtue of sophrosyne or
self-control. In this understanding, female virtue is coextensive with female
obedience to male and the dissociation of women from their own emotions.
Silence is seen to be the realm of women, which results in the construction of
“othernesss” of women’s language, since they are considered to lack the ability
to control their speech. Under this condition, female words become some kind of
lack of words and require to be channeled into rational discourse that belongs
to men. In her essay “The Gender of
Sound”, Anne Carson examines how our presumptions about gender affect the way
we hear sounds and raises the question if “there might not be another idea of
human order than repression. Related to and as an extension of this question,
it will be questioned if it may become possible to construct narrative in the
feminine in this paper. For this purpose, it will be focused on Carson’s “The
Glass Essay” and the question if there is another human essence of self within
the context of her views on this subject.
Keywords: gender, gender identity, gendered sounds, musculinity, femininity,
Sophrosyne.
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