Josephine Hoegaerts – författare

What was considered a good, normal, or healthy voice in the nineteenth century?In 1854, singing master Manuel Garcia became the first person to see the vocal cords at work in a human throat. Less than a decade later, surgeon Paul Broca identified what he called a speech center in the brain. The almost simultaneous invention of the laryngoscope and the discovery of Broca's area present important turning points for how medical, musical, and other experts understood how the human voice works.These developments did not occur in a vacuum, however. In Speaking, Stammering, Singing, Shouting, Josephine Hoegaerts describes the ambitious attempts, throughout the nineteenth century, to observe, understand, and manage human voices, as well as the host of more traditional, domestic, and stereotypical beliefs about the voice that continued to exist alongside these new insights. She peers into the stammering therapist's office, over the singing teacher's shoulder, and occasionally into the laryngoscope to see how something so simple—the sound Europeans produced when they opened their mouths—changed over the course of the nineteenth century.Combining insights from medical and musical histories with methods from the fields of sound studies and the history of experience, Hoegaerts traces how people imagined human voices in the nineteenth century and how they used them. Rather than focusing on the great singers and orators of the age, the book looks at the mundane daily practices of singers, speakers, and stammerers and the people who trained and studied them. What did it take, according to all these increasingly specialized professionals, to have a normal voice in nineteenth-century Europe?

This book focuses on the multiple and diverse masculinities ‘at work’. Spanning both historical approaches to the rise of ‘profession’ as a marker of masculinity, and critical approaches to the current structures of management, employment and workplace hierarchy, the book questions what role masculinity plays in cultural understandings, affective experiences and mediatised representations of a professional ‘career’.

Histories of voice are often written as accounts of greatness: great statesmen, notable rebels, grands discours, and famous exceptional speakers and singers populate our shelves. This focus on the great and exceptional has not only led to disproportionate attention to a small subset of historical actors (powerful, white, western men and the occasional token woman), but also obscures the broad range of vocal practices that have informed, co-created and given meaning to human lives and interactions in the past. For most historical actors, life did not consist of grand public speeches, but of private conversations, intimate whispers, hot gossip or interminable quarrels.　 This volume suggests an extended practice of eavesdropping: rather than listening out for exceptional voices, it listens in on the more mundane aspects of vocality, including speech and song, but also less formalized shouts, hisses, noises and silences. Ranging from the Scottish highlands to China, from the bedroom to the platform, and from the 18th until the 20th century, contributions to this volume seek out spaces and moments that have been documented idiosyncratically or with difficulty, and where the voice and its sounds can be of particular salience. In doing so, the volume argues for a heightened attention to who speaks, and whose voices resound in history, but refuses to take the modern equation between speech and presence/representation for granted.