Aural Intimacies: Gendered Constructions of Familiarity on The Mary Margaret McBride Program

In this project I theorize the work of Mary Margaret McBride who hosted a number of shows on American network radio from 1934-1954. On her genre-defying programs, McBride chatted in a casual and unscripted way with guests, fluidly discussing both their professional and personal lives. McBride’s relationship with her listeners was characterized by feelings of closeness, trust, loyalty and intimacy (Ware, 2005). I connect McBride’s relationship with her fans to radio history and theory, especially certain ‘media fantasies’ (Verma, 2012) of the early twentieth century in which radio was understood as a particularly important medium for fostering connection, community, and democracy (Loviglio, 2005; Marvin, 1988; Mosco, 2004; Peters, 1999). I present findings from my archival research at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. In my analysis, I follow Neil Verma (2012) and John Barnhurst and Kevin Nerone (2001), and focus on the form of McBride’s program. I investigate what her program sounds like, and how and why did it fostered such close personal connections between listeners, guests, and McBride. My research suggests a number of factors which may have contributed to the atmosphere of gendered familiarity evident in McBride’s work. I argue that McBride’s embrace of magazine format, innovative advertising techniques, use of pace and audioposition (Verma, 2012), combined with the fluidity and non-segmentation of her show, constructed an audio media context in which listeners felt connected to each other, to McBride, and to the products she promoted, constituting an emergent structure of feeling (Williams, 1977)

Sensate sovereignty : A dialogue on Dylan Robinson's hungry lIstening

Dylan Robinson's Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies emerges from encounters between Indigenous sound performance and Western art music. The book takes aim at the pernicious tendency for the latter to insist upon aesthetic assimilation as the end-goal of these encounters, which far too often means derogating the former’s ontologies and protocols of song. In this dialogue-review, members from the The Culture and Technology Discussion and Working Group (The CATDAWG) situate the book within sound studies and critiques of settler colonial listening, reflecting on the major conceptual contributions of the book such as sensate sovereignty, hungry listening, and critical listening positionality

Textiles sismographes : Symposium fibres et textiles 1995, actes du colloque = Textiles sismographes : Texts from the Colloquium

A collection of texts presented at a colloquium on fibres and textiles by 11 artists, 12 critics and teachers, and students. The authors puzzle over the notion of a "textile identity" and the problem of successfully integrating theory and practice in textile work. Essays are printed in original language with corresponding brief French or English abstracts. Biographical notes. 39 bibl. ref