The lecture lends its title from Stephen Amico’s forthcoming book ‘Femina Sovietica: The Female Voice in Russian Popular Music’. It should appeal to scholars and student within numerous fields (Russian Studies, Musicology, Popular Music Studies, Gender Studies, Media Studies) as well as to anyone with an interest in popular music and/or Russian culture.
Steven Amico is associate professor of Music at the Grieg Academy, University of Bergen. He is author of “Roll over, Tchaikovsky: Russian Popular Music and Post-Soviet Homosexuality”. He has published numerous articles on Soviet- and Russian popular music.
Although women’s presences have been central to musical-sociocultural constructions in the Russian-speaking world, and the voice arguably the sine qua non of the vast majority of mass mediated popular music over the past several decades, both continue to be present in academic research on Russian popular music largely as signifying absences. In this lecture, I will be discussing my current monograph project entitled Femina (Post-) Sovietica: Women, the Voice, and Russian Popular Music in which I aim to 1) redress the aforementioned lacunae in the academic literature (which misrepresent not only “music history,” but the sociocultural landscape as a whole) by critically engaging the work of several representative female artists; 2) locate the work of these artists in relation to both global and local forces linked to constructions of the female, the feminine, and/or (post)-feminist; and 3) in line with the corporeal and sensory turns in social-science/humanities research, to engage the sociocultural/musical via explicit attention to an embodied voice – a locus which has often been overlooked in cultural studies as a whole.
Attention to the voice will be central to the project, yet I will not seek to present a unified “theory of the voice”; much to the contrary, understanding the complexity of the human voice, and the myriad productive ways it may be approached (from the philosophical to the psychoanalytic to the critical-cultural; see, inter alia, Cavarero; Connor; Derrida; Dolar; Middleton; Ong), my approach will be to engage the theoretical via the corporeal/audible/material. Operating from the understanding that the body is the very precondition for all second-order theorizing (Merleau-Ponty) I will propose that an “abstract” “theory” of “voice” does not/cannot exist; rather, we may only approach understandings of “voice” by attention to specific, contextualized instantiations.