Lauren Elkin's New Book Explores Singing as a Vessel for Feminism and Power

Women’s singing is framed as expression, rebellion, vulnerability, and power. The female voice is portrayed as spectacle and threat, with historical patterns of punishment, fear, and silencing. The work moves through personal experience, literary criticism, and feminist theory, using myths and cultural references such as sirens and The Little Mermaid alongside artists and public figures. A professional singing background informs an exploration of the vocal break, where the voice shifts between registers, as a metaphor for resistance shaped by uncontrollable forces. Gendered conventions and prescriptions across genres are examined, including how politics, religion, and technologies such as AI and autotune can silence women’s voices.

"Vocal Break Art Monsters author examines the female voice as both spectacle and threat, exploring how women have historically been punished, feared or silenced for using their voices. Seductive, authentic, naked, shameful, Elkin draws on the lore of sirens, Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, Homer's Odyssey, and figures ranging from Cyndi Lauper and Kathleen Hanna to Cynthia Erivo, Maria Callas, Kamala Harris and more."

"It wasn't until later that the soprano changed mediums, instead pursuing her writerly voice as an instrument that is less exhaustive and freer. Subsequently, Elkin explores the singing voice as a site of contention, utilising her own vocal break - the point at which the voice transitions between chest and head voices, possibly cracking - as a metaphor for the uncontrollable factors of resistance that women face."

"Elkin explores the notion of 'cool', comprehensively analyses gendered conventions and prescriptions across genres and singing styles, and looks at how even today women's voices are silenced through politics, religion and technologies like AI and autotune. From personal anecdotes to Lacanian psychoanalysis, Vocal Break is a gesamtkunstwerk that evokes a sense of both fury and awe."

"Part memoir, part manifesto, traces the cultural history of women singing as an act of expression, rebellion, vulnerability and power. Moving between personal anecdote, literary criticism and feminist theory, the Lauren Elkin's new book Vocal Break Art Monsters author examines the female voice as both spectacle and threat, exploring how women have historically been punished, feared or silenced for using their voices."

Read at AnOther