Unveiling Her Voice in the Realm of the Male Voice
摘要
After establishing the postrevolutionary “modesty laws” to regulate the representation of women and gender interactions in 1983, some films in the mid-1990s adopt embodiment strategies alongside spatial strategies, occasionally oscillating between these approaches, in order to portray women’s voices while challenging the modesty codes. The imposition of what is essentially a veiled voice prohibits singing and emotional expressions. As a result, this insistence on bodily concealment is not only about seduction or what Mladen Dolar has discussed in terms of voice as a fetish object but also related to the suppression of individuality and uniqueness of vocal expression. As such, any kind of vocal expression that emphasizes women’s bodies and their individuality is controlled and forbidden, while male voices can venture freely within the realm of body, language, and even beyond language. In my argument, using Lacan’s description of “objet a” and Dolar’s distinction of voice as aesthetic pleasure in singing versus as an object cause of desire, I discuss how women’s voices appeared in the assumed domain of the masculine voice as a source of aesthetic admiration and desire which actually evaded censorship.