Listening with a Feminist Ear

Listening with a Feminist Ear is a study of the cultural politics of sound in Bollywood cinema. Taking as its subject the expansive domain of the aural in cinema, this book identifies singing, listening, and speaking in cinema as key sites in which notions of identity and difference take form. The book traces sonic representations of gender and community across seven decades of Hindi film history and asks which sounds and tongues Bombay and its cinema call their own. The book takes seriously the radical potential of listening and models a critical orientation to the aural that can engender new imaginaries, while still being attuned to questions of difference, power, and privilege. Keeping in play the many different sonic elements that films use, as well as the “inter-aural” fields in which those sounds register, Listening with a Feminist Ear helps chart new and interdisciplinary paths through the history of cinema. Challenging the ocular-centrism of cinema studies and its emphasis on medium specificity, the book offers a feminist interpretive practice that centers sound and listening. It also moves beyond national, monolingual, and Eurocentric frameworks, generating counter-hegemonic understandings of belonging so sorely needed in our times.

Pavitra Sundar is Associate Professor of Literature at Hamilton College.