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# Title
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- Voluminous bodies
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- The volume of female voices
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- Knowing and inhabiting with your voice
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- Amplifying a collective female voice
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- The sounds of
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- feminism
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- Amplified voices
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- Embodied streaming/amplification
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Research question:
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How can the female voice occupy space and reveal dark aspects, that in its mediation can be anything else than harmful for the establishment of a democratic society?
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# Introduction
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In recent years my ongoing concern has been on the presence of the female voice in public. During my previous studies I gradually realized how my gendered body had been silenced or marginalized through slight gestures from male figures or institutional powers that were obfuscating this situation. Observing, as well, female in their roles as members of my family, teachers, workers and immigrant neighbors of my youth I discovered different types of marginalization and silencing. Examples would be women working at home, taking care of everything in the family and leaving behind their own desires, men interrupting them when articulating arguments in a political/formal dialogue and underestimating their knowledge. The mediation of their voices and the way they were becoming present, active participants and visible in public spaces and spheres became one of my main interests. My past projects reflected and responded to that concern while I worked with voice and sound which, as forms of art are underestimated in the context of western visual culture. They are forms connected to irrational attitudes and primary oral cultures. The sound of voices reveals hidden suppressed aspects and subjectivities. Because of its temporariness, non-linearity, invisibility and borderless character [long sounds text] sound can exist and travel within multiple dimensions of spaces simultaneously, creating bonds between them. Throughout history, oral cultures, by being based on vocal expression, differ from the literate cultures in that they embrace the collective sharing of knowledge. More specifically they create "personality structures that in certain ways are more communal and externalized, and less introspective than those common among literates" (Ong, 2002, pg. 67). Feminists have included and embraced voice in their practices because there is a uniqueness in it that embodies the speakers and their personal stories while connecting the ones being present. Together with this concern I also experienced a gender-based differentiation between amateur and expert knowledge when approaching telecommunication networks and technologies with the intention of learning to build and use them. This separation goes together with the gender exclusion. I quickly found out that I was not alone in this regard. In the example of an activist collective, called Prometheus, volunteers expressed similar concerns in the construction of a radio station:
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>"The radio activists presented the work of soldering a transmitter, tuning an antenna, and producing a news program or governing a radio station to be accessible to all. Nevertheless, they were conscious of patterned gaps in their organization and volunteer base: men were more likely than women to know how to build electronics, to be excited by tinkering, and to have the know-how to teach neophytes.This troubled the activists"(Dunbar-Hester, pg. 53-54).
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In one of my projects, *Sound Acts in Victoria Square* I 'inserted' the recorded sounds of women’s voices into existing conversations at a public square in Athens that was male dominated. Most of the frequenters were immigrants and refugees from different periods of migration to Greece. They had come from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Albania, Georgia, Russia and other foreign countries. The gender bias and the way they used the public space differed according to their country of origin. However it was common that many of the young women visiting the square were just passers-by with shopping bags or kids in tow. The men, on the other hand, were hanging out with their friends, occupying many spots of the square for hours. My intervention was like so; first, I realized and recorded conversations, over two months, with women I met in the square, as well as archived and ordered the collected material. Then I planned and realized the in-situ broadcasting of the collected sound material and directed the new relations and conversations with the public for one day in June 2015. The intervention lasted for some hours and different people, mostly men, were participating in conversations that would include the women's voices or not. Their voices came from a past time of the same place, when they were physically present. At another time only their words were there and 'participated'. From my description of the project: "The broadcasted female voices were abruptly intervened with the existing conversations in the specific places, giving the impression of an non-invited 'absent' guest" (Diakrousi, 2015, pg. ). They were distant voices. The audio speaker and myself were mediating them in the then-current public space.<br>
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My ongoing research after that lead me to the public forums, speech, and the technologies that facilitate them, always with a feminist perspective. This thesis is a series of 5 essays which relate to female voice, collective voice and their mediation. They address the voice as a feminist tool for communicating, and an object of presence and inhabiting space. Historically, some modes of addressing have been marginalized and shut out of the public domain (see *the monstrosity of female voice*). The separation between private and public space has played an important role as it reflects and it is related to gender separation. The collective voice is marginalized under the realm of the patriarchal individualistic society. The female voice is part of it. The texts deal particularly with the voice as a medium for collective practices (see *the monstrosity...*). This collective vocalization affords the amplification and multiplication either with the aid of technology or embodied practices (see *Multiplication vis a vis amplification*) that refuses dominant ways of establishing presence and dialogue. In a patriarchal democracy there is a fear of ugly forms of address which are connected to the female body- blood, birth, death, mourning- and other dark aspects and passions that are perceived as threatening to society. These are forms of vocalization that are excluded from public discourse which centers on “self-control” and “reason”. Such things are seen to create noise and disorder and "have to be kept" silent according to the patriarchal norms. But alternative mediums and forms of communication have been developed against this (see *transmitting ugly things*). There are technologies for self-control and filtration. Men are taught to express themselves in particular ways and they are taught to instruct women to be silent. In the current era we see how technologies serve to filter forms of collective voices; again this aims to reduce “noise” and thus to exclude (see *Let’s talk about unspeakable things*).
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