Abstract

My thesis proposes that we should listen to masculine voices in a new way. Instead of listening to the voice as a locus of liberal interiority or as a gateway to identity, I read it as an event of relationality between speaker and listener. With a focus on 21st century American cinema, I situate the voice as the site where questions of power, language, race, and gender converge --either through dialogue or through clusters of hidden signifiers. Throughout “Sounds Tough,” I use compelling motifs from sound studies, such as the ventriloquist, the vortex, and the hypnotist,
as guides through sonic encounters with male performance. Each film revisits and remakes history in different ways, using stylized male vocal intonation as a technique to challenge or subsume realist representation. The first chapter on "Brokeback Mountain" (Lee, 2005) argues against the popular belief that Ennis Del Mar’s mumbling is a symptom of his repressed queerness, opting instead to read it as a tentative attachment to speech. Spike Lee’s satire
"Bamboozled" (2000) has been a crucial text in Black cinema, yet its protagonist’s mannered vocal performance has mostly been ignored despite its rejection of essentialist claims to blackness. The subject of my third chapter, "The Master" (Anderson, 2012), stages contrasting vocal performances from Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Phoenix’s emotive mumbling and Hoffman’s oratorical prowess are complementary expressions of post-war turbulence. In "The Master," the body rather than the voice is a medium for power and violence. By analyzing these three films through the voice, this thesis reveals how the voice articulates new futures by inflecting history’s echoes.