Radio's New Wave by Loviglio Jason;Hilmes Michele;

Author:Loviglio, Jason;Hilmes, Michele;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Aesthetics, Power, and Intimacy

To summarize my argument thus far, despite the trope of “disembodiment,” voices, bodies, and identities all travel together through the ether, perhaps unmoored from and only loosely correlated with the speaker's “actual” body and identity, but nonetheless entering the world of representation and therefore, importantly, the world of political effectivity. The question then arises: why is it that so few of those sonically represented bodies on the radio—regardless of the ways that they signify race, gender, class, or region—happen to also signify disability?

As mentioned above, there is no shortage of self-evident reasons why non-disabled voices thoroughly dominate radio, not least of which is the commercial imperative: broadcasters want listeners to stay tuned, therefore they find speakers and speaking styles that audiences are willing to listen to, with voices that listeners can easily understand and find pleasing to the ear. While undoubtedly sensible as a matter of capitalist logic, however, we need to question the aesthetic reasoning at the root of this supposedly listener-centered approach to speaker selection as well as the idea that “pleasing to the ear” is somehow a sufficient explanation for the absence of disabled voices on the radio. The key problem is that, as Lawrence Grossberg has pointed out (and as the earlier discussion of female broadcasters illustrates), aesthetics and affect are not easily disentangled from the larger ideological context within which they emerge; instead, “affect always demands that ideology legitimate the fact that [some] differences and not others matter.”30 Shawn VanCour suggests that the affective character of radio voices “might be perhaps more productively viewed not as unraveling operations of discourse but instead forming their explicit target, as that aspect of voice which ideology works to legitimize and imbue with special cultural meaning or value.”31 The target here, it seems clear, is the ideology of “compulsory able-bodiedness” and the rejection of disability identities. Tobin Siebers writes that, “The ideology of ability stands ready to attack any desire to know and to accept the disabled body in its current state.”32 We cannot begin to expand the range of permitted voices on radio without simultaneously undermining the ideologies of ability and disability that disqualify those voices in the first place.

The aesthetic argument against disabled voices runs into further difficulty when we consider how the normative limits of aural culture are at such marked variance with the thirst for bodily non-normativity we find in visual culture: from Victorian-era freak shows to today's film and television programs of all genres, representations of both real and fantastical non-normative bodies are in perpetual demand. This is especially true of horror and comedy but can also be routinely observed in drama, reality television, and other genres (e.g., Dr. Weaver's hip dysplasia on ER, wheelchair-user Artie Abrams on Glee, Gregory House on House, M.D., the entirety of shows like The Biggest Loser or Rollin’ With Zach; the list is endless). Furthermore, the difference between the relative frequency of visual representations and the relative paucity of aural representations of non-normative bodies also extends to the soundtrack: except in the realm of comedy (e.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.