The Role of Voice in Gender

After reading Liana M. Silva's "As Loud As I Want To Be: Gender, Loudness, and Respectability Politics", there was a newfound perspective to sound—gender.

Silva's disdain for her masculine voice comes from society's expectations that a gender should sound, behave, and talk in a certain way. While we should see beyond this, it does affect how we perceive others. While many people attribute stereotypes to race, food preference, style of dress, attitudes, etc., the role of audio in subconscious human is just as prevalent. Silva touches on two stereotypes that seem to be ridiculed by society in the "loud Latina" or "angry black woman."

Our senses are always working simultaneously so it makes sense that one would not stand out by itself, contributing to how we perceive audio against our typical social norms. Voice suggest personality. It suggests what you think of yourself, whether it be highly or lowly. Like anything else, it can fit into a clean-cut box of social expectations. Voice, like many other things, is a beauty standard that is perpetuated by archaic outlooks towards women. The notion that women sound dainty and fragile is counter productive to the feminist movement and the need for dominant woman in not only the workplace, but the world as a whole. Our subconscious makes a lot of judgment by itself so before we make social progress, we must understand all of our biases, even those that seem as minimal as our interpretation of sound.