Sound Unseen: Auscultating Gendered Violence in Mexican Fiction

We are pleased to welcome professor Tamara L. Mitchel for a visit to our department, and cordially invite you to join us for an invited lecture.

About the Presentation:
Thinking with Nietzsche, Peter Szendy asserts that auscultation—or listening to the sound of spacing—allows the philosopher “to make quiet things—mute things—‘speak out’” (133). The present study attunes to spatialized sonority in the Mexican author Guadalupe Nettel’s Después del invierno (2014) and La hija única (2020) as a means of sensing the invisible but pervasive domestic violence experienced by nearly a third of women globally. Meditating on this reality, the present study reads Nettel’s fiction as a reflection on our collective inability to perceive gendered violence due to patriarchal social norms and structural misogyny.

Intimate partner abuse often occurs behind closed doors and is therefore easily disregarded. In line with this out-of-sight-out-of-mind logic, I show how Nettel’s sonic novels turn to the sense of hearing to bear witness to the violence suffered by women in Mexico and elsewhere. In dialogue with Sound Studies scholars Michel Chion, Kaja Silverman, and Szendy, I illustrate how the works’ narrative soundscapes become a means of indexing and critiquing the invisible misogyny of the novels’ pages, which in turn index the structural misogyny that gives invisible form to our common modes of perception. Theorizing the notion of “aural care,” I listen for acousmatic sound (sound out of view of the protagonist-listener) and auscultation (the sounds of spacing) to suss out how violence may be out of sight, but it is still perceptible to those willing to listen for it.

About the Presenter:
Tamara L. Mitchell, Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of British Columbia, works at the intersection of politics and aesthetics in contemporary Latin American narrative fiction. She has peer-reviewed articles in Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, CR: The New Centennial Review, Modern Language Notes, and Chasqui, among other venues, and her first monograph, Novel Distortions: Postnational Form in Mexico and Central America, is under review with Pittsburgh University Press. Her current research interests are deeply attuned to the role of sound in literary and cultural expression, and she is working on a SSHRC-funded monograph entitled Sounds of the Capitalocene: Extraction and Aurality in Mexican Literature and Culture. She is founding Director of the Sound and the Humanities Research Cluster at UBC, co-editor of a special issue on Latin American Literary Aurality (Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 2023), and will serve as Guest Editor of a review dossier on “Sound, Listening & Music in Latin American Criticism” for the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.