Inaudible voices: transnational feminism, music, and listening in our time of crisis

This chapter examines how a transnational musical feminism that centers marginalized musicians, decenters whiteness, and engenders different ways of listening to the plants and animals (human and other-than-human) that inhabit our sonic planet, can contribute to confronting the climate crisis. Drawing on the work of feminist scholars, scientists, bioacousticians, musicians, and musicologists globally, it shows how listening (to birds, the world around us, human music) has often been foreclosed by bias (geographical, gendered, racial), resulting in a data bias and gender gap in music scholarship, scientific research, and global musical performance. Examining the cross-cultural work of musician-scholar Maud MacCarthy, it considers the female musicking body, male appropriation of women’s work, and what is at stake in centering women’s work. In a focus on ‘Somos Sur’ (We are the South), by rap artists Anita Tijoux and Shadia Mansour, it argues for a transnational feminism led by the Global South.