The Women of Quyi

Liminal Voices and Androgynous Bodies

Francesca R. Sborgi Lawson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315307855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

Why has the female voice—as the resonant incarnation of the female body—inspired both fascination and ambivalence? Why were women restricted from performing on the Chinese public stage? How have female roles and voices been appropriated by men throughout much of the history of Chinese theatre? Why were the women of quyi—a community of Chinese female singers in Republican Tianjin—able to become successful, respected artists when other female singers and actors in competing performance traditions struggled for acceptance? Drawing substantially on original ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the 1980s and 1990s, Francesca R. Sborgi Lawson offers answers to these questions and demonstrates how the women of quyi successfully negotiated their sexuality and vocality in performance. Owing to their role as third-person narrators, the women of quyi bridged the gender gap, creating an androgynous persona that de-emphasized their feminine appearance and, at the same time, allowed them to showcase their female voices on public stages—places that had been previously unwelcoming to female artists. This is a story about female storytellers who sang their way to respectability and social change in the early decades of the twentieth century by minimizing their bodies in order to allow their voices to be heard.

1 The Female Voice and Body Problem

Like the body from which it emanates, the female voice is construed as both a signifier of sexual otherness and a source of sexual power, an object at once of desire and fear.

Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (2001: 3)

Adorno infamously claimed that phonographic recordings of female voices are problematic because a woman’s singing voice requires the presence of her body (Engh 2001: 120). He believed that listening to a mechanical recording prevents the appreciation of the female voice by removing it from the body that gives it subjective meaning for the listener.¹ Adorno’s claim reflects a longstanding ambivalence towards the voices and bodies of women, displayed throughout the history of musical performance.² As Dunn and Jones argue, “the female voice, whether it is celebrated, eroticized, demonized, ridiculed or denigrated, is always stigmatized, ideologically ‘marked,’ and construed as a ‘problem’ for the (male) social critic/auditor, who demands concern if not control” (2001: 9). And the stigma attached to the female voice is exacerbated by the presence of the female body.

This chapter will discuss what I call “the female voice and body problem,” through selected examples from Western musical theater and contrasting examples from Chinese musical theater. Despite the vastly different historical and philosophical paradigms that undergird Western and Chinese musical performance, one recurring theme is the perceived need either to contain the power of the female voice and body or to eliminate female singers completely from public performance.

The female voice and body problem

Evidence of the apparent need to restrict female musicianship abounds in the ethnomusicological literature. Carol Robertson claims:

In many cultures that purposefully use musical performance to coerce or control social status, ritual knowledge and power are believed to have belonged to women in the distant past. At some point in ancient memory, women aborted their power or were tricked into submission by competing males. Subsequent mythical explanations are given to show why women should be excluded from the dominant power structures and why men fear and must regulate the behavior of women. In other situations, men explain that since women have such great force as birth-givers, they must be kept from other kinds of power that would give them complete control over the lives and fertility of a community.

(1989: 228)

Robertson’s explanation for a universal antagonism between the sexes is pointed and provocative (see also Robert Murphy 1957, 1973),³ and meshes well with much of the research presented in Ellen Koskoff’s book A Feminist Ethnomusicology: Writings on Music and Gender (2014). In summarizing the relationship between feminist and musicological research over the past 40 years, Koskoff highlights the ongoing problem of a ubiquitous andro-centrism that devalues women’s contributions to music (Koskoff 2014: 26). Koskoff cites important ethnomusicological research that moves beyond a simple binary view of gender difference to include the role of what I would call liminal performers—those who function outside of set gender and social norms (2014: 26, 29–30).⁴ She argues that women who function outside the male-female binary are often awarded certain musical freedoms unavailable to conventional female performers (26).

In exploring the reasons for universal androcentrism and the importance of liminal performers in music, I turn to Faye Dudden’s concept of “the body problem,” which states that female performers in public venues are consumed for their sexuality rather than appreciated for their artistry. Dudden explains:

The continuing problem of a woman in public, on the street and in the workplace, is the same as the problem of a woman on the stage: she must be there in the body. To be present in the body carries with it the inherent risk of being taken as a sexual object against one’s will—in sexist deprecation, in sexual harassment, in physical assault. Theatre thus exemplifies a general problem for women in public, what we might call the “body problem.”

(1994: 3)

The female body problem is intensified when a female performer sings in public, and the ambivalent responses to female voices and bodies in performance engender a complex set of cultural negotiations in both Western and Chinese musical theater. The role of liminal male and female performers in both Western and Chinese musical performances underscores the importance of showcasing the prized treble voice in an androgynous body as a way of reducing the anxiety associated with the female voice and body problem. Western theater traditionally limited, removed or contained public performances of female singers, and, after the Emperor Qianlong’s ban on female public performance (Harris and Pease 2013: 2), Chinese theater generally avoided featuring female singers on public stages until the early years of the twentieth century.⁵

Replacing and containing female singers in Western music

In order to appreciate how female singers have been received in public venues, it is important to recognize some of the underlying female archetypes that produce ambivalence towards women in European and North American musical theater. Linda Phyllis Austern provides one of the most elegantly articulated discussions about the dichotomous way women were perceived in seventeenth-century English culture:

The ambivalence implicit in this English conception about women stemmed from the Christian legacy in which Mary and Eve were seen respectively as agents of salvation and destruction, and from the Classical legacy in which women were seen as sirens capable of luring men to their deaths by their seductive voices.

(1989: 420)

This dual inheritance, she explains, eventually merged into the Puritan ideological emphasis on biblical literalism (420), which placed women in a clearly subordinate position and kept women off both theatrical and liturgical stages.

The reason women were banned from participating in liturgical performances stems from the passage in 1 Corinthians 14:34, in which Paul states that women should be silent in church—a ban that was interpreted as including singing as well as speaking throughout Christian Europe for several centuries. Austern observes that pre-Civil War England was one of the European cultures

in which the cardinal virtue of public female silence was so firmly entrenched that the soprano and alto voices of the church choir belonged exclusively to males, lest the sound of Eve’s descendants lure Adam’s fallen sons from their devotion to God

(1996: 84).

The silencing of the female voice, and the resulting invisibility of the female body on stage, ultimately extended to all public venues, because it was believed that men who succumbed to too much feminine influence were in danger of losing their masculinity (Austern 1996: 109). Since English theater was considered an effeminizing institution (Orgel 1996: 29), attending theatrical performances threatened to “sap the virility of male spectators, the dominant and most significant faction of the audience, rendering them unfit for positions of military or civic leadership and robbing the nation of economic vitality” (Shapiro 2006: 40). For this reason, the theater was a sexually charged venue, and men were particularly at risk because of the emasculating power of the spectacle.⁶ Female voices and bodies were highly restricted to remove that risk.

Androgynous solutions: Boy sopranos and castrati

One solution to maintaining the treble sound in church and the female role in theater, in both religious and theatrical venues, was the use of androgynous prepubescent males. Since the treble voice was highly desirable as a balance to the lower male ranges and served as a manifestation of angelic sound in church, the preferred solution in England had been to employ juvenile male voices in church choirs, a practice that began in the thirteenth century (Zieman 2008: 21–28). By the time of the English Renaissance, contemporary theories about gender equated boys and women in vocal range and outward physical characteristics, thus rationalizing the substitution of boys for women on the theatrical stage and in church choirs. Because boys and women were perceived to be similarly underdeveloped both morally and spiritually, they

required adult male control and gentle guidance toward properly restrained behavior. The issue of sexual control was strongly reflected in attitudes toward musical performance, since music itself was perceived as the most powerfully sensual of the arts, and … was regarded as an overwhelmingly feminine force unless strictly regulated.

(Austern 1996: 102)

However, using young males to replace females as singers presented a challenge because of their relatively short careers as treble singers. In the seventeenth century, castrating a boy before puberty to permanently fix his voice in the treble range was seen as a viable long-term solution. Freitas explains that:

the procedure froze him within the middle ground of the sexual hierarchy … The castrato would have been viewed as equivalent to the boy … Although his body would increase in size, his surgery ensured that his vital heat, and thus his physical characteristics, would remain at the less markedly masculine level of youth.

(2009: 108)

The boy was transformed by surgical mutilation into

something deemed more compelling than Nature’s own creations. And yet this change did not make him alien. Rather, theater and life so thoroughly interpenetrated in this century as to make a castrato … seem just one more avatar—if especially vivid—of the erotically boyish male.

(Freitas 2009:148)

By the eighteenth century, a time when artifice dominated cultural and theatrical performances, the castrato figure was considered an embodiment of the extravagance of the age as well as a popular replacement for the female singer (148).

Castration became increasingly popular in providing treble voices for Italian opera and liturgical music in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As the tradition took hold, the powerful and highly trained voice of the castrato dominated in ecclesiastical and dramatic settings. Prest explains that

a good castrato … offered a highly desirable combination of vocal brilliance and power, a wide vocal range, and exceptional breathing capacity. Additionally, the unearthly (i.e., unfamiliar and unusual) timbre of his voice brought to church music a “sense of asceticism and angelic asexuality.”

(2013: 130)

Notwithstanding the brilliant and unearthly sound of the castrato, Bartoli wonders why performers and music scholars have rarely discussed the barbarism associated with the castrato tradition (2009). Bergeron cites one particular incident in the eighteenth century in which an elaborate effort was made to avoid discussing the surgical procedure associated with castration, resembling “what we would call today an ‘open secret,’ a narrative practice concealing an unsavoury act in the folds of a great, culturally sanctioned alibi” (1996: 171).

Despite the apparent taboo against openly discussing castration, and the savagery of the practice,⁷ the issue of castration anxiety became a central idea in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Freudian psychoanalysis. Although an in-depth discussion of castration anxiety is well beyond the scope of this work, Barbara Creed’s provocative rereading of Freud’s ideas (Creed 2007: 87–166) provides insights that are pertinent to my argument about the enormous efforts expended to avoid witnessing and recognizing the central role of the female voice and body. Instead of subscribing to Freud’s notion that women terrify because their genitals appear castrated, Creed argues that women’s genitals terrify because they might castrate. She explains:

Fear of the castrating mother may also help to explain the ambivalent attitude in which women are held in patriarchal societies—an attitude which is also represented in the various stereotypes of feminine evil that exist within a range of popular discourses … My intention, however, is not to try and absorb the figure of the maternal castrator into Freud’s theory of the Oedipus and castration complexes but rather to point out the inadequacy of these theories in helping us to understand the origins of patriarchy.

(2007:164)

Creed’s claim that women are feared as castrators aligns with many of the above-mentioned ideas about Western female singers as emasculating, sirenlike seducers of hapless male victims (Austern and Naroditskaya 2006). Creed’s reading also speaks to the notion of androcentrism. She explains:

Perhaps one should conclude that acceptance of the notion of “woman as castrator” rather than “woman as castrated” is not only threatening to Freud as a man but also damaging to his theories of penis envy in women, the castration crisis and the role he assigns to the father in the transmission of culture.

(2007: 121)

Creed’s idea of the “femme castratice” as a requisite for removing the emasculating female voice and body by creating a female-sounding substitute⁸ informs her assertion that the “threat of castration is not something enacted in the real; it is always symbolic” (160). But the castrato tradition was, indeed, real. The practice of castration had waned significantly by the nineteenth century, and the last...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Musical Examples
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the Text
• Prologue
• Introduction
• 1 The Female Voice and Body Problem
• 2 Literary Voices: Metaphysical Heroines
• 3 Musical Voices: Balancing Text and Tune
• 4 Liminal Voices: Transferring Artistry from Master to Disciple
• Conclusion: Masters of Liminal Space
• Epilogue
• Appendices
• References
• Index