Murder, she spoke: the female voice’s ethics of evocation and spatialisation in the true crime podcast

Abstract

The female voice in cinema has been discussed throughout film sound theory as persistently de-acousmatised, denied the power of narrative creation and relegated to onscreen, visual space. This paper will contrast this visual containment of female vocalisations with that of the female-hosted podcast, in which nothing is or can be seen. The podcast offers alternative routes of resistance for the female acousmetre, allowing her to maintain her disembodied status. This is poignantly evident in the popular true crime podcast, My Favorite Murder, in which the acousmatic female hosts counter crime film and television’s reliance on images of violated female bodies with purely aural recountings. Through their anti-ocularcentric reliance on the aurally evocative, rather than the visually manifested, these female voices transform themselves and the victims of their discussions into haunting spectres that force listeners to imaginatively reconstruct scenes of female-directed violence, while acknowledging the ethics of their complicity in the propagation and popularisation of these narratives. Thus, the true crime podcast is one potential site of doubled resistance against the de-acousmatisation of female voices and the visualisation of mutilated female bodies; this resistance leads to an ethics of the spectral, a Derridean mourning without end.

Keywords:

• Voice
• gender
• ethics
• violence
• acousmetre
• podcast
• spectrality
• true crime

Acknowledgements

Thank you, M, always. Thank you to Professor Angelica Fenner of the University of Toronto for supporting this project and providing valuable feedback. To my cohort, the members of which offered useful and pertinent advice: many thanks. And, finally, to My Favorite Murder, for making a 90-minute commute bearable.

Notes

1. Each of these puncturing noises also draws listeners into the everydayness of the hosts’ (and their own) existence. In this sense, such distracting and jarring sounds emphasise the ordinariness of the situation, the environment – Hardstark’s apartment. The ordinary comes back into view, reframed and translated for us by these hosts in a way similar to Kathleen Stewart’s attentiveness to the ordinary’s affective charges in Ordinary Affects (2007). The ordinary – forgotten through the engrossing narratives of My Favorite Murder – wheels back into view, tearing back onto the scene and proclaiming its inherent violence. Indeed, these disruptions emphasise the ordinariness of violence by bringing listeners back down to earth, so to speak, by reminding them of their vulnerable embodiments and the impersonal banality of violence. For the scope of this paper, attention will primarily be paid to the spectral (which is not to say that spectrality is not part of the ordinary); the voice’s connection to the ordinary is a rich topic meriting further exploration.