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Feminism in Play pp 51–67Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

From Sirens to Cyborgs: The Media Politics of the Female Voice in Games and Game Cultures

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Games in Context ((PAGCON))

Abstract

A critical account of the ‘public voice of women’ provides a historical starting point to understanding the myriad of both tangible and symbolic ways in which women’s voices are policed and silenced. This chapter asks, how are the power dynamics of voice, including ‘silencing’ and ‘speaking out’ reflective of and constituted by the actual media representations of women’s voices, ‘feminized’ sound effects, and soundscapes that are part of game texts and the gaming experience? This chapter provides a unique methodological paradigm and model for drawing connections between the ways in which women’s voices have been historically positioned, translated, and policed across different media, and the way women’s ‘symbolic’ voices are received, silenced, and policed in the arena of online mass communication.

‘Voice’ is one of those apparently simple everyday words that have astonishingly prismatic qualities. It is a term that at once encapsulates ideas of the body, identity, expressiveness and subjectivity as well as ideas of agency, opinion, power, and political participation

(Lacey 2013, 123)

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Acknowledgments

I’d like to acknowledge the generous support of the ReFiG SSHRC partnership grant, as well as Maggie MacAuley’s vital contribution to the theoretical background review.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada

    Milena Droumeva

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  1. Milena Droumeva
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and Communication, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Kishonna L. Gray

  2. Department of Communication Arts, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Gerald Voorhees

  3. Department of English Language and Literature, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Emma Vossen

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Droumeva, M. (2018). From Sirens to Cyborgs: The Media Politics of the Female Voice in Games and Game Cultures. In: Gray, K., Voorhees, G., Vossen, E. (eds) Feminism in Play. Palgrave Games in Context. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90539-6_4

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