To date, feminist scholars have developed projects and established archives to recover the contributions of women in sound and technology and untangle the gender assumptions that have excluded their work from the histories of media arts (Džuverović and Neset 2001; Rodgers 2000, 2010; Malloy 2003). Panellists in this session bring together female practitioners from the north and the south to develop alternative media art historical narratives and artistic genealogies of sound art. Cutting across geographic prejudices and disciplinary boundaries, the panellists in this session, build intergenerational connections across places and periods to make visible how artistic practice and technological curiosity happen simultaneously.

This session investigates how media artists explore the construction of ‘otherness’ through sound and the intersections at which sound studies, and feminist historians of sound, theorize sound as an affective experience where able-bodied-privilege, gender, race or other axes of difference are constituted (Stoever, 2006; Eisdheim, 2018; Bronfman, 2016; Ehrick, 2015; Droumeva, 2019 and Ochoa, 2012). The panellists in this session examine soundscapes by theorizing how difference is being constituted, challenged or reinforced through artificial, human and non-human sounds. They make audible the contributions of the undocumented, invisible, forgotten, and excluded from dominant histories of sound art and speculate how difference might be considered as a non-binary construct that both challenges historical constructs of power and imagines potential futures.