Sonic Cyberfeminisms, Perceptual Coding and Phonographic Compression

Abstract

I argue that sound-centric scholarship can be of use to feminist theorists if and only if it begins from a non-ideal theory of sound; this article develops such a theory. To do this, I first develop more fully my claim that perceptual coding was a good metaphor for the ways that neoliberal market logics (re)produce relations of domination and subordination, such as white supremacist patriarchy. Because it was developed to facilitate the enclosure of the audio bandwidth, perceptual coding is especially helpful in centring the ways that patriarchal racial capitalism structures our concepts and experiences of both sound and technology. The first section identifies sonic cyberfeminist practices that function as a kind of perceptual coding because they subject ‘sound’ and/or ‘women’ to enclosure and accumulation by dispossession. The second section identifies a type of sonic cyberfeminism that tunes into the parts of the spectrum that this perceptual coding discards, building models of community and aesthetic value that do not rely on the exclusion of women, especially black women, from both humanist and posthuman concepts of personhood. Here I focus especially on Alexander Weheliye’s ‘phonographic’ approach to sound, technology and theoretical text. This approach, which he develops in his 2005 book of that title and in recent work in collaboration with Katherine McKittrick, avoids fetishising tech and self-transformation and focuses on practices that build registers of existence that hegemonic institutions perceptually code out of circulation. I conclude with examples of such phonographic compression, including Masters At Work’s ballroom classic ‘The Ha Dance’ and Nicki Minaj’s ‘Anaconda’.