Listening with a Feminist Ear

"Pavitra Sundar's Listening with a Feminist Ear: Soundwork in Bombay Cinema, a lively, original, and cogent feminist analysis of singing, listening, and speaking in popular Bombay cinema, explores how gendered and sexualized identities materialize. Given the consistent attentiveness to the female body and voice in Bombay cinema, the intervention this book makes should be of interest to media and gender scholars. Each chapter offers rich and layered analyses that model the generative possibilities of feminist listening for a field that has until now primarily focused on the visual. Well-researched, building on the work of other scholars and placing them in conversation with Bombay cinema, the book offers new insights into feminist cinema studies. The methodological inventiveness of this work and the originality of its readings offer rich and exciting accounts of these cultural forms."

-- MLA Aldo & Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies

“Sundar brings to the study of Bombay cinema the methods and insights of sound studies and feminism to produce a thoroughly original monograph that provides a model for how sound might be studied in cinema with an eye to historical and industrial specificity.”

-- Sangita Gopal, University of Oregon

“Listening with a Feminist Ear is a tour de force. Using a robust theoretical framework, Sundar carefully illuminates the historical, technological, and ideological factors sustaining paradigms of sonic representation, effects, and modes of listening across seven decades of Hindi cinema. Superbly written and researched, this study foregrounds the importance of gender and sexuality in cinematic and cultural soundwork. Highly recommended.”

-- Caryl Flinn, University of Michigan

“Pavitra Sundar has made an important contribution to sound studies and film studies with this rigorous and insightful analysis of the singing, listening, and speaking of popular Bombay cinema. Sundar’s clear prose and compelling case studies work to update the historical narrative and help us to listen more deeply, more broadly, and more sensitively to an influential tradition of soundwork.”

-- Jacob Smith, Northwestern University

“Listening with a Feminist Ear lives up to the promise of listening to sound differently and not just using sound to register difference. Sundar offers an elegant analysis of the power of listening and the generative potential of soundwork.”

-- Sujata Moorti, Middlebury Col