Presented by the Sound and Humanities Research Cluster, with support from the Public Humanities Hub.
Sound Silence Power
a thematic series hosted in collaboration with Green College
Professor Tamara Mitchell, UBC
“Sound Unseen: Auscultating Gendered Violence in Mexican Fiction”
Thursday, February 29, 5:00-6:30PM | Green College Coach House
The Sound and the Humanities’ Sound Silence Power thematic series closes with Cluster Director Tamara Mitchell’s talk on sensing the unseen but pervasive domestic violence experienced by approximately one-third of women globally. Examining the use of spatialized sonority by Mexican author Guadalupe Nettel, Mitchell shows how Nettel’s sonic novels turn to the sense of hearing to bear witness to the violence suffered by women in Mexico and elsewhere. While domestic abuse often occurs behind closed doors and is therefore easily disregarded, in Nettel’s novels, listening emerges as a sense regime that interrupts this out-of-sight-out-mind logic. Through an examination of auscultation and acousmatic sound, Mitchell points to the emergence of forms of care and community organized around aurality.
Talk and Q&A to be followed by a wine and charcuterie reception in the Green College Piano Lounge. For more details, see the Cluster’s Events page.
Tamara Mitchell is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at UBC and works at the intersection of politics and aesthetics in contemporary Latin American narrative fiction. Her current research interests are deeply attuned to the role of sound in narrative fiction, and she is working on a SSHRC-funded monograph entitled Sounds of the Capitalocene: Violence and Aurality in the Contemporary Mexican Novel. That project posits that literary aurality is employed in recent fiction as a means of responding to and critiquing economic and ecological crises.
She is founding Director of the Sound and the Humanities Research Cluster, co-convener of the Latin American Sound Studies Working Group (2020-present), and co-editor of a special issue on “Latin American Literary Aurality” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos (October 2023).
Event Abstract:
Thinking with Nietzsche, Peter Szendy asserts that auscultation—or listening to the sound of spacing—allows the philosopher “to make quiet things—mute things—‘speak out’” (133). The present study attunes to spatialized sonority in the Mexican author Guadalupe Nettel’s Después del invierno (After the Winter 2014) and La hija única (Still Born 2020) as a means of sensing the invisible but pervasive domestic violence experienced by nearly a third of women globally. Meditating on this reality, the present study reads Nettel’s fiction as a reflection on our collective inability to perceive gendered violence due to patriarchal social norms and structural misogyny. Intimate partner abuse often occurs behind closed doors and is therefore easily disregarded. In line with this out-of-sight-out-of-mind logic, Tamara Mitchell shows how Nettel’s sonic novels turn to the sense of hearing to bear witness to the violence suffered by women in Mexico and elsewhere. In dialogue with Sound Studies scholars Michel Chion, Kaja Silverman and Szendy, Tamara illustrates how the works’ narrative soundscapes become a means of indexing and critiquing the invisible misogyny of the novels’ pages, which in turn index the structural misogyny that gives invisible form to our common modes of perception. In particular, she listens for acousmatic sound (sound out of view of the protagonist-listener) and auscultation (the sounds of spacing) to suss out how violence may be out of sight, but it is still perceptible to those willing to listen for it.