In 2009, Susan Boyle's debut roused Simon Cowell from his grumbling slumber on the television show "Britain's Got Talent" and viewers across the world rallied to the side of the unemployed, older woman with the voice of a trained Broadway star. In Mismatched Women, author Jennifer Fleeger argues
that the shock produced when Boyle began to sing belies cultural assumptions about how particular female bodies are supposed to sound. Boyle is not an anomaly, but instead belongs to a lineage of women whose voices do not "match" their bodies by conventional expectations, from George Du Maurier's
literary Trilby to Metropolitan Opera singer Marion Talley, from Snow White and Sleeping Beauty to Kate Smith and Deanna Durbin.
Mismatched Women tells a new story about female representation in film by theorizing a figure regularly dismissed as an aberration. The mismatched woman is a
stumbling block for both sound and feminist theory, argues Fleeger, because she has been synchronized yet seems to have been put together incorrectly, as if her body could not possibly house the voice that the camera insists belongs to her. Fleeger broadens the traditionally cinematic context of
feminist psychoanalytic film theory to account for literary, animated, televisual, and virtual influences. This approach bridges gaps between disciplinary frameworks, showing that studies of literature, film, media, opera, and popular music pose common questions about authenticity, vocal and visual
realism, circulation, and reproduction. The book analyzes the importance of the mismatched female voice in historical debates over the emergence of new media and unravels the complexity of female representation in moments of technological change.
Introduction
1. Literary Divas: Trilby, Christine, and the Phantom of Phonography
2. Metropolitan Women: Geraldine Farrar and Marion Talley Silence Opera on Screen
3. Opera in Synch: Deanna Durbin and Musical Playback
4. The Disney Princess: Animation and Real Girls
5. Kate
Smith: The Variety "Femcee" on Radio and Television
6. Susan Boyle: The Amateur in the Age of Auto-Tune
Conclusion
Bibliography
There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.
Jennifer Fleeger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at Ursinus College where she teaches courses in the film studies program. Her first book, Sounding American: Hollywood, Opera, and Jazz, also appears in Oxford's Music/Media Series.
Making Sense - Margot Northey and Joan McKibbin
The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was - Wendy Doniger
Changed for Good - Stacy Wolf
Seeing Through Music - Peter Franklin
Off Key - Kay Dickinson
