Radio and the Gendered Soundscape: Women and Broadcasting in Argentina and Uruguay, 1930-1950

Description

This book is a history of women, radio, and the gendered constructions of voice and sound in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Montevideo, Uruguay. Through the stories of five women and one radio station, this study makes a substantial theoretical contribution to the study of gender, mass media, and political culture and expands our knowledge of these issues beyond the US and Western Europe. Included here is a study of the first all-women's radio station in the Western Hemisphere, an Argentine comedian known as 'Chaplin in Skirts', an author of titillating dramatic serials and, of course, Argentine First Lady 'Evita' Peron. Through the concept of the gendered soundscape, this study integrates sound studies and gender history in new ways, asking readers to consider both the female voice in history and the sonic dimensions of gender.

Christine Ehrick is Associate Professor of History at the University of Louisville, Kentucky.

'Through a series of beautifully written accounts of women's voices as they resounded in Rio de la Plata's midcentury soundscape, this book will change the ways we listen. Christine Ehrick deftly restores a crucial sonic dimension to the conjuncture of feminism and modernity and insists on new ways to comprehend its comedic, political, and melodramatic registers. Precisely crafted, at once witty and profound, this is a superb invocation of a sonorous past.' Alejandra Bronfman, University of British Columbia 'By opening up the cultural history of Latin American radio to English-speaking readers, Christine Ehrick has made an enormous contribution to scholarship in itself; when combined with her nuanced and detailed focus on women's voices and the way that gender operates on the airwaves, she has produced a work that will resound across many fields. Those interested in both old and new media, in cultural history, in gender, and in sound studies must read this account of radio rioplatense, from Radio Femenina, the first all-female radio station, to the radio pioneers Silvia Guerrico, Nini Marshall, Nene Cascallar, and Eva Peron.' Michele Hilmes, University of Wisconsin, Madison 'This is a groundbreaking study. Christine Ehrick's focus on gender revitalizes the historiography of Latin American radio, while her analysis of such neglected figures as Silvia Guerrico and Nene Cascallar, as well as her innovative reconsideration of Eva Peron's radio career, contribute substantially to our understanding of Argentine and Uruguayan political and cultural history. Most impressively, by attending consistently to women's voices - and not just their words - Ehrick has set a methodological example that other historians of the media would do well to follow.' Matt Karush, George Mason University, Virginia 'Ehrick's print archive is impressive, and it allows her to reconstruct not just a remarkably detailed history of female broadcasters and scriptwriters, but also a complex portrait of radio's transnational politics ... Ehrick's book is not only an important contribution to feminist history in Latin American and radio studies more generally, but it points to the urgent need for further studies of the transnational politics of radio.' Tom McEnaney, Sound Studies