DIVAS AND THEIR PUBLICS

In order to exist, the female vocal celebrity needs a public. This course takes a global perspective on women’s voices, bodies, and performances, examining them in deep sociocultural contexts across a range of classical and popular music genres. Guiding questions interrogate the role of media and technology in commercializing and circulating the sounds and images of women singers on an international scale, forging new arenas for meaning-making around gender, race, and citizenship. Considering the historically, socially, and materially situated circumstances in which celebrated women performers have emerged in the modern era, the course asks: How did the expressive labor of virtuosic female singers shape the early US entertainment industry? In what ways have women singers around the world impacted nation-centered political agendas, struggles for racial equality, and other powerful religious and secular social formations? How did sound reproduction and broadcasting technology not only expand audiences on an exponential scale, but transform listeners’ experience of female singers’ live performance? Cross-culturally and throughout history, why have exceptional women vocalists had greater public impact than women instrumentalists?