Human history is filled with unacceptable sounds: high-pitched voices, gossip, talkativeness, hysteria, wailing and ritual shouts. Who makes them? Those deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control: women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes all fall into this category. 

Sarah Shin and Irene Revell, editors of Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear (Silver Press) and the conveners of the Bodies of Sound book series, facilitate a collective reading and discussion of Anne Carson's *The Gender of Sound* (Spiral House, 2025). 

From the myths of antiquity to Margaret Thatcher via Sigmund Freud and Gertrude Stein, The Gender of Sound charts the gendering of sound in Western culture. Carson invites us to listen again, and in doing so to reimagine our conceptions of human order, virtue and selfhood.

Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death.

Bios

Sarah Shin works with poetic cosmologies, dreams and myth. Her practice gathers writing, research, publishing, curation, performance and dialogue to engage expansive ways of knowing. A serial collaborator, recent projects include The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K Le Guin, an exhibition at the Architectural Association and publication edited with So Mayer; Bodies of Sound, a book and curatorial series with Irene Revell; Mirror, a polymorphous world-building act with Sammy Lee that unfolds from a mythic world across performance, exhibition, tarot and games; and with Mark Lowe, Concrete Poetry, an architecture, narrative and design practice. She directs Spiral House, a new imprint, and is among the founders of Silver Press and 5D, an artistic collective for unified inquiry into many knowledges. 

Irene Revell is mostly a serial collaborator. She teaches on the MFA Curating at Goldsmiths, and Co-Leads the Scoring Warnings AHRC research project at CRiSAP where she is Senior Lecturer in Sound Research. In 2019 with Primary Information she re-published the Womens Work text score anthology co-edited by Alison Knowles and Annea Lockwood (1975 - 1978). With Sarah Shin she edited the anthology book project Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear (Silver Press, 2024) and eponymous ongoing series for Spiral House.

*Reading the text in advance is not essential, but encouraged. We will be selling it at the usual event discount to ticket-holders ahead of this event*

Entry requirements: no age restrictions (under 18s to be accompanied by an adult over 21yrs, 1:1 ratio) — Read more — Read less