Gender and the Telephonic Voice from the Landline to the Smartphone
Chapter
Overview
Identity
Additional Document Info
Other
View All
Overview
abstract
In the 1870s Alexander Graham Bell introduced his talking box to the public, and although early uses included piping in news, church services, and music to peoples homes, relatively quickly the device became rather stabilized as a form of point-to-point communication. Since those early days, numerous sounds have been associated with landline telephony (buzzers and rings; new phrases and patterns of speech) and have been compounded by mobile telephony (ringtones, ringback tones, message alerts), but in this chapter, I draw inspiration from that early name for the telephone the talking box to focus on one particular type of sound: the gendered voice associated with the telephone. The telephone, and by extension, the voice associated with it, is intimately connected to culturally constructed notions of gender, and this has been true since the phone industry encouraged such associations, which early on were extremely limiting for women. At the same time, womens telephone use has been constitutive of modes of individual and collective empowerment that have upset these taken-for-granted norms. Drawing from interdisciplinary scholarship, this chapter presents an overview of the evolution and meaning of this gendered voice, both human and mechanical from the practiced voices of the early hello girls to the female voice in mobile communication.
