A VOICE OF THEIR OWN

The main issue that I’m concerned with, especially as it relates to language, is: what kinds of assumptions do people have about sex roles that they don’t recognize? And language is a tremendous carrier of those assumptions, but we don’t know how to self-examine them. Yes, people are beginning to realise that there is a male culture, there is a female culture, and culture and language are terribly intertwined. But the question is: where have we not even learned to look and where is it that people are resisting looking? I mean, if you say to somebody, “The pronouns you use say tremendous amounts about your beliefs and your culture,” people will laugh at you.

–Jo-Ann Kolmes, “Women’s Language and Literature: A Voice and a Room of One’s Own,” Voiceprint

 

CLIP 1: Jo-Ann Kolmes on pronouns from Voiceprint (1981), on Aviary (0:15:55-0:16:31).

The interview with Jo-Ann Kolmes excerpted above aired on The University of Alberta campus radio series Voiceprint on March 3, 1981, in an episode titled “Women’s Language and Literature: A Voice and a Room of One’s Own.” Kolmes was then working as an editor for an academic periodical in Alberta. As heard in the clip, women had to fight for gender-neutral forms of address in print at a time when androcentric language was the norm. More than forty years have passed since the interview was first broadcast, and the rhetoric around gendered language has shifted in significant ways with the development of queer theoretics and a recognition that gender expression is not just a binary divided between he and she, though the prioritisation of the male at the expense of the female remains a pervasive issue.¹ Gender identity and expression has, in turn, become a political flashpoint. In the United States, bills forbidding the expression of gender outside of traditional binary understandings of male and female recently passed through state legislatures, and Conservative politicians in Canada have pursued similar efforts to enact exclusionary policies that LGBTQ+ rights advocates argue specifically target and harm trans and gender-diverse youth.² With all this in mind, Kolmes’s core concerns around self-definition and how structures of power are enacted (and challenged) through language are more resonant than ever.

Kolmes’s voice, as heard in the soundbite, is compelling in its rawness; we can hear her exasperation as she recounts how often she met resistance when asking that authors use non-sexist language in the articles they were submitting for publication. At the same time, the interview-as-sounded-event did not occur spontaneously, but through decisions made by the largely student-run production team at Voiceprint. For these creators, campus radio was more than just a medium for communication, or even a broadcasted exhibition; it was also a gathering space. Shelly Ruth Butler and Erica Lehrer describe exhibitions as “scenes of social and political action and the performance of culture and community.”³ Radio, as reimagined through the curatorial lens, might similarly be understood as both a “public site and event,” but one which, unlike a gallery exhibition, is unbounded by time or space and continuously unfolds through multiple listenings or “re-soundings.”⁴

This study “re-sounds” Voiceprint in multiple ways. First, it provides a historical overview of this campus radio series and the circumstances of its discovery, digitisation, cataloguing, and curation. Second, our article shows how polyvocality functioned for the creators of the show as both an eco-acoustic aesthetic of disharmony and discord and an ideological strategy, which in articulating its feminist (and anarchist) message of plurality, diversity, inclusion, and social justice, helped to create and shape activist communities. Lastly, our investigation of and, indeed, our interventions in Voiceprint augments the ways in which a curatorial moment unfolds across multiple chrono-topologies, ricocheting and reverberating far beyond the initial sonic event.

Radio historians such as Stacey Copeland, Erika Engstrom, Susan Carter, Caroline Mitchell, and others have made a compelling case for the role alternative radio has historically played in cultivating alternative political communities, specifically feminist communities.⁵ Campus radio is a similarly important, and perhaps overlooked, archive of feminist oral history. As we found, the so-called “radical feminist” conversations happening on University of Alberta (UA) radio shows, such as Voiceprint, contrast markedly with the more conservative mainstream newspapers as well as the often-blatant sexism and misogyny of student-run papers, like the Engineering Society’s periodicals, The Godiva and The Bridge, in addition to, as asserted by some readers, the more subtle sexism of the official student newspaper The Gateway.⁶

Our article is also informed by Lehrer and Butler’s notion of exhibitions as “arguments.”⁷ Building on their work, our case study of gender discourse in campus radio and newspapers shows how radio production might function as a form of curation, with different clips selected, edited, and cut together in order to construct a particular polemic. Voiceprint’s polyvocal format, in which multiple voices and perspectives were stitched together, was a dynamic curatorial approach that shared agency and knowledge creation, helping to reshape the conversation around gendered language by “giving voice” to feminist scholars and student activists who sought to challenge sexist speech and disrupt the gender status quo. Accordingly, we also take a polyvocal approach and participate in some curation of our own: our three distinct voices harmonise in this co-authored essay, and, through an intertextual web of audio and video clips, books, scholarly articles, newspaper articles, comic strips, and podcast episodes, continue to amplify an ongoing conversation about language and gender, now spanning four decades.

 

Voiceprint and Curation through the SpokenWeb Project

Voiceprint was initially broadcast across Alberta on the community radio station CKUA during the years when the station was affiliated with the University of Alberta. The show was created and hosted by Jars Balan, then enrolled in the Master of Arts in English program, with support from production assistant and audio engineer Terri Wynnyk, a political science undergraduate. This radio series, with the tagline “Speech, Language, Communications Technology, and the Literary Arts in a Changing World,” was grounded in personal interviews with artists and scholars. Unlike traditional scholarly media like academic journals, the show spoke to a wider public, and the producers had a unique ability to take what could be esoteric, academic concepts and make them accessible by transmuting the written word into sound and voice.⁸ Through radio, students like Balan and Wynnyk experimented with new forms of scholarship, broadcasting outside the ivory tower, through the quad, the pub, the dormitory, and beyond.

The Kolmes interview and others like it were rediscovered by the authors of this article, then-Graduate Research Fellows with the University of Alberta’s SSHRC SpokenWeb Partnership, in the process of digitising and documenting a collection of historical campus radio recordings. The UAlberta research team is part of a larger cross-institutional and multi-disciplinary consortium of “researchers dedicated to the discovery and preservation of sonic artefacts that have captured literary events of the past to activate these artefacts in the present.”⁹ The SpokenWeb Partnership began with the discovery of a collection of tape-recorded  poetry readings. Initially, the Partnership concentrated its archival efforts on materials of this genre. Since then, the Partnership’s extensive audio record holdings, which now number in the thousands, have expanded to include a range of materials, some of which defy easy classification. The circumstances in which the audio events in this archive were captured are not always known. Close and careful listening is therefore required in order to fill informational gaps and accurately catalogue and index the material, taking care in the curatorial process of our metadata collection.¹⁰ 

In fall 2020, SpokenWeb UAlberta acquired a number of CKUA radio recordings, including the aforementioned Voiceprint series. The task of digitising this newly-acquired radio collection – along with other audio recordings in hard-to-classify genres including radio plays, formal and informal interviews with authors or experts, classroom visits, and lectures – necessitated a rethinking of catalogue language and classifications. For instance, where previously the speaker might be identified as a “performer” or “audience member,” a radio show might require a “host” or “guest.” Likewise, where an author reading typically consists of an introduction, a formal reading, and a Q&A session, a radio show might be indexed in other ways that capture their unique format, which might combine various news, interviews, audio essays, and performance segments. In short, the CKUA fonds and its accompanying metadata needed to conform to established SpokenWeb standards of metadata description, even as they disrupted them.

For digital humanities scholar David Berry, the digitisation of research collections invites new approaches to curation, with the archive reconceptualised as a “malleable” living entity as opposed to a “stable,” static structure.¹¹ Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod likewise home in on the potential of remediation as both a critical and creative practice that “reconfigure[s], refuse[s], and remake[s]… the archival structures that inform cultural meaning.”¹² Building on these twin concepts, to “de-archive” or “unarchive,” as Berry and Camlot and McLeod respectively call it, might be to move beyond simple preservation and towards activation, consciously engaging with and responding to the archival materials, including through acts of research-creation.¹³ As a case in point, the process of indexing the CKUA/Department of Radio and Television literary radio shows for the SpokenWeb UAlberta collection inspired The SpokenWeb Podcast episode “Academics on Air,” which was released on May 2, 2022;¹⁴  from that podcast episode sprang a paper on Voiceprint, which we presented at the SpokenWeb Partnership’s 2022 Symposium, “The Sound of Literature in Time.” Now, this published essay has evolved from that conference paper. Indeed, our initial podcast episode led us to seek out and speak to Balan, Wynnyk, and Kolmes – in the now, as living subjects – thus dramatising the “resonant confrontation between structures of the past and the present.”¹⁵ After delving into the historical archive of campus radio and the newspaper articles that engaged with and informed the Voiceprint episode’s themes, we observed that the rhetoric around gendered language had shifted in significant ways: in the 1980s, critical focus was on cultural assumptions of a default maleness, whereas today, the focus is on gender identity and its linguistic expression.

 

Voiceprint as Resistance

The production of the “Academics on Air” podcast episode opened up new avenues of research, and our deep dive into the “Women’s Language” episode led us to “ground zero” of a campus scandal that, for the most part, has long since been forgotten. The original Voiceprint episode, which was produced to commemorate International Women’s Day in March 1981, followed a nationwide debate about gender and language. During this time, newspapers produced by engineering students at The University of Alberta, The University of Saskatchewan, and The University of Toronto had become notorious for their misogynistic content. As law professor Wanda Wiegers explains, these papers “prominently featured and promoted sexist and homophobic humour,” in which women appeared primarily as pornographic caricatures or silent sexual objects to be consumed.¹⁶ The controversy sparked a larger, national conversation about sexist language and its role in upholding misogynistic power structures, both within academic institutions and Canadian society at large. These were the signs of the times, and Voiceprint was right there, reading them and voicing them. While Wiegers focuses on the overt sexism of the engineering papers, our case study shows how feminists were active in the debates around sexist speech, not only in print, but as they unfolded across multiple media sources on campus.

In January 1981, one month prior to the Voiceprint episode’s release, the conversation around gender and language was briefly hijacked by a tasteless article in a little-known UAlberta student paper that went the nineteen-eighties equivalent of viral. The controversy centred on The Godiva, a special newspaper published once per year by the Engineering Students’ Society to mark Engineering Week. The article in question, titled “Pediophiliology,” professed itself to be a “how-to” guide on “picking up” women, written for the “engineer who is seeking an adventure in new and unusual challenges.”¹⁷ The author, in a malicious attempt at satire, goes on to describe the process of drugging, kidnapping, sexually assaulting, and killing young girls.¹⁸ The incident made headlines in the mainstream media as well as in student newspapers across Canada.¹⁹ 

CLIP 2: Jo-Ann Kolmes, in a 2022 interview with authors Miya and Kroon, relates her feelings of “shock and anger” at The Godiva story and the failure of academic institutions to take action to protect female students to her own experience of being harassed while studying at Stanford. She recalls the time her all-female dormitory hall was “raided” by a mob of frat boys and how the residents stood up to them. ²⁰

In the immediate aftermath, there was a public outcry, and the student editors of The Godiva and its affiliate paper The Bridge were forced to publish a written apology.²¹ In light of the incident, some female UAlberta students pointed out that the article was evidence of a deeper problem of sexist and misogynist behaviour on campus.²² However, as recorded in the discourse of the campus newspapers, the legitimate complaints of these women were frequently dismissed and discredited. It was a common belief that though The Godiva story was in “bad taste,” the article was merely satire, not to be taken seriously.²³ One letter to the editor describes the “furor” over The Godiva as “laughable” and admonishes the feminist activists on campus to “GIVE IT A REST.”²⁴ Similarly, readers of the mainstream metropolitan newspaper, The Edmonton Journal, expressed more concern about the impact on male students than their female counterparts: in their view, the engineers were the ones being victimised, having had their reputation unfairly tarnished by the negative news coverage.²⁵ Here, public empathy is reserved for the accused male students, while the women who spoke out are cast as hysterical or dangerous. In this way, the female students’ very reasonable concerns were made to seem unreasonable.

The relationship between language and power reverberates throughout the Voiceprint series, particularly in the episode, “Women’s Language and Literature: A Voice and a Room of One’s Own.” Voiceprint was not dissimilar to other print publications like The Bridge and The Gateway in the sense that the student-led production team did not shy away from “edgy” content and, in fact, readily courted controversy. For example, CKUA refused to broadcast Voiceprint’s final episode because it included profane language: an ironic fate, given that the subject of the banned episode was “censorship” and “linguistic taboos.”²⁶ At the same time, the radio show’s tone was markedly different from that of the more conservative campus papers because of their emphasis on caring for the actual lives of people in marginalised communities on campus rather than abstractions such as “free speech” or “traditional grammar” – neutral-sounding terms that have been historically weaponized by reactionaries to push back against women and people of colour who have rightly challenged the insidious ways in which patriarchal and colonial institutions propagate themselves within language.

 

Airing Feminist Voices

Community and campus radio have historically been among the few safe spaces to have radical political discussions and to build feminist communities. In Canada, as in the United States, radio and television were overwhelmingly male-dominated. In 1975, for instance, all 70 of CBC’s hosts and co-hosts were men, and commercial stations were little better.²⁷ Women in broadcasting, who were often relegated to secretarial jobs or behind-the-scenes research work, responded by organising protests and creating feminist collectives.²⁸ At the same time, the federal government passed new legislation like the Canadian Human Rights Act (1977), which prohibited discrimination on “the basis of sex.” As a result, by 1981, female reporters were finally being heard and seen on radio and television.²⁹ But women on air, specifically women’s voices, continued to be targeted for criticism. One Toronto Star columnist complained that women were unsuitable for TV: “It has something to do with the voice. When women try to engage in a hard-hitting interview they somehow sound hysterical. They always remind me that I haven’t taken out the garbage.”³⁰ Women were also expected to integrate into male-dominated broadcasting spaces without disrupting the status quo. In other words, women on air were tolerated as long as they toed the line and did not challenge established hierarchies of power. As such, women’s stories and issues were frequently “trivialised” and downplayed in the mainstream media.³¹

Copeland theorises that historically, for feminist activists, the airwaves were safer because of their ephemerality; there were no permanent records available at the time of the discussions had on air, and the speakers were not as easily identifiable.³² As such, the progressive, feminist ideas and voices that could be heard on campus radio shows such as Voiceprint contrasted with the conservatism of mainstream stations as well as the often-breathtaking misogyny expressed in campus newspapers. Unlike commercial and public radio stations, which catered to wider, national audiences, campus radio shows were grassroots, community-driven, DIY ventures. With no obligation to be profitable or even a sense of who (if anyone) was listening, student DJs and radio hosts had the freedom to experiment with edgy formats and content. Campus papers were similarly uninhibited, but could be hostile to female perspectives, as seen in The Godiva, with female students targeted for bullying and harassment.

The Voiceprint series provides an important example of how the curation of a radio show shifts social issues from the intellectual and the abstract into the actionable: in this case, the issue of women’s rights. The series’ feminist consciousness was no doubt shaped by the political engagement of the students on the team. Jars Balan, a graduate student in the English and Creative writing program and the host and creator of the series, was an outspoken political activist and proud feminist.³³ When he was not interviewing future literary stars, such as Margaret Atwood, Stephen Scobie, Phyllis Webb, and Aritha van Herk, he organised avant-garde poetry readings at Erewhon Books, a “radical,” “feminist anarchist” book collective, which was run out of the “basement of a Whyte Avenue hobby shop” in Edmonton.³⁴ Balan’s creative collaborator was political science student Terri Wynnyk, who acted as Voiceprint’s production assistant and sound technician. Wynnyk’s often-prominent role in the Voiceprint series, as well as other campus radio shows, was significant because, at the time, women in mainstream public radio had to fight for representation in all roles. In 1980, for instance, only two percent of technicians at CBC were women, and just 19.7 percent were producers.³⁵ After getting her start in campus radio, Wynnyk went on to become a documentary filmmaker and has since described in interviews for The SpokenWeb Podcast the challenges of working in a male-dominated field.

CLIP 3: Terri Wynnyk interview on women in broadcasting (2022), (47:28-50:46).

The topic of “Women’s Language” for this episode of Voiceprint was not chosen in response to The Godiva fiasco or any other single incident on campus. Rather, as Wynnyk described it, the episode’s theme was responding to a larger cultural conversation around gender and language and was, in this sense, “emblematic of what was happening at the time, in terms of feminist issues.”³⁶ As she explained, the Voiceprint team prided themselves on their ability to push boundaries and challenge conventional thinking around controversial political issues. Upon relistening to archival clips from the “Women’s Language” episode during an interview with the authors of this essay, Wynnyk appreciated how that episode is a credit to the women on the team, including herself and guest speakers such as Kolmes and Anna Altmann; it contains a lot more of her own content than she had initially realized. Wynnyk remarked, “I wrote that clip… I’m hearing my voice in that.”³⁷ In the same interview, she explained that, as a female producer and technician, it was important for her to speak up on behalf of other women: women “had to fight – still have to fight – for equality.”³⁸ 

While Wynnyk and the other female contributors had ready allies at hand, including Balan and Executive Producer Roman Onufrijchuk, that does not mean that there was no friction between these women and their (mostly male) colleagues. Wynnyk quips, “we had a lot of fun pushing these guys on… their sexism!”³⁹ She went on to describe how, because of her bold attitude, “I did get branded as being… an outspoken feminist [, a] …radical feminist…. And it was very easy for men that didn’t want to hear women clamouring for equality to just dismiss us as ‘Rad Fems.’”⁴⁰ As Wynnyk’s testimony illustrates, an active effort by allies to acknowledge privilege and accompany that acknowledgement with changes in behaviour and language is absolutely necessary in order to audibly demonstrate their commitment to caring for the student community. In working through these issues intellectually as part of the radio show, the male contributors in the Voiceprint team were confronted by the everyday political reality experienced by their female colleagues and had to adapt appropriately.

 

Sonic Subversions

The progressive politics of Voiceprint were nurtured through its “unruly” format: the sonic collage. The radio show’s sound design plays with disharmony. The otherworldly synth intro, devoid of a recognizable tune, rises and falls in intensity, oscillating between the right and left channels; high-pitched, metronomic blips reminiscent of Morse code serve as a counterpoint to the low percussive bursts suggestive of an aluminium sheet being pounded with a hammer. This jarring intro theme would not be out of place amidst the avant-garde proto-Industrial music groups of the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as Kraftwerk, Vangelis, Throbbing Gristle, or Cabaret Voltaire. The otherworldly, futuristic ambiance recalls as well the groundbreaking work of female synth artists like Laurie Spiegel, Suzanne Ciani, and Pauline Anna Strom, who at the time were making waves in the burgeoning electronic music scene with their unique experiments in computerised music.⁴¹ Other segments of the show are bookmarked with octavising tone progressions similar to those used in a hearing exam; the station identification segment sounds like a phased mouth harp swallowed up by a disturbing, repetitive pulse distorting in pitch from low to high and back again, like applying a pitch-shifter to a skipping compact disc. Later still, these abstract electronic sounds collide with the beautiful choral arrangement that is Judy Collins’ feminist labour anthem “Bread and Roses.”⁴² These sometimes-harmonious, sometimes-discordant soundscapes provide the listener with sonic variety and provoke a plurality of meanings: mysterious, disturbing, fun, tender, intriguing, intellectual, rebellious, futuristic, cool. Just as many human voices come together in the show to challenge each other, the listener, and society as a whole, so too do these machine voices come together to join the choir.

CLIP 4: Sonic collage of Voiceprint music and sound (1981).

Voiceprint is polyphonic not just in its sound design, but in its curatorial ethos. Where editorial-driven papers like The Bridge sought to monopolise political discourse on campus, drowning out dissonant opinions, Voiceprint embraces multiplicity. For Butler and Lehrer, curation can be an opportunity to wrestle with a “given question or issue” and as a means of “social intervention.”⁴³  There is, in their view, also an “affective quality” to exhibition spaces, which are “both meditative and informative, appealing to both our intellects and to our emotions.”⁴⁴ The exhibition as an exploratory space, an invitation to intervention, resonates with the Voiceprint team’s creative philosophy. Rather than assert a specific point of view, the Voiceprint team approached the subject of gender and language with curiosity and openness. As was typical for the Voiceprint series, Balan opens the “Women’s Language” episode with a question, but resists the urge to provide a conclusive answer. Instead, the listener is guided through a sonic exhibition of sorts: a collection of interviews, monologues, and creative performances that engage with the chosen theme.

Through its valuing of diverse perspectives, Voiceprint’s curatorial program models the feminist (and anarchist) praxis of inclusive polyvocality. The episode on women’s writing, for instance, features soundbites from and interviews with a feminist editor, a self-described “woman writer,” an ear, nose and throat specialist doctor, an academic, and, of course, the voices of the student production team. Voiceprint’s proto-intersectional approach weaves together the viewpoints of seemingly disparate individuals to create dialogue around a single topic that is “mutually constitutive rather than [a series of] individual, unconnected factors.”⁴⁵ In resisting a univocal, monolithic voice, the Voiceprint team adapts a feminist praxis akin to Hélène Cixous’ écriture féminine, an ethos of women’s writing that embraces the conscious, critical performance of an essentialized femininity, especially all of those “bad” traits that have been traditionally assigned to women in Western culture.⁴⁶ As Anne Carson observes in “The Gender of Sound,” women in the ancient world, going all the way back to Pythagoras and his Table of Opposites, were aligned with “all that is raw, formless and in need of the civilising hand of man,” embodying everything “curving, dark, secret, evil, ever-moving, not self-contained and lacking its own boundaries.” These unruly creatures are ever “set over against straight, light, honest, good, stable, self-contained, and firmly bounded” masculinity.⁴⁷ In performing a sonic format that is chaotic, discordant, disharmonious, pluralistic, mysterious, and gynocentric, the Voiceprint team capitalises on the “ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder, and death.”⁴⁸ They liberate themselves from the stereotypes of a hegemonic femininity and embrace the balancing strength of the alchemical archetype of “the lunar.”⁴⁹ They are medusae, witches, rebels, righteous trouble-makers – forerunners of the “feminist killjoy” of today, raining on the parades of patriarchy.⁵⁰

Indeed, as cultural scholars Viola Thimm et al. argue, polyvocality can be an intersectional strategy that draws attention to the complex ways in which identity and power “collide,” to quote Kimberlé Crenshaw.⁵¹ Certainly, intersectionality and polyvocality were present in the praxis, if not explicitly named, of various community-oriented, DIY-driven venues throughout the 1980s, including zines and, as shown here, campus radio.⁵² Forefronting the voices of the people in marginalised communities, as opposed to making claims from second-hand accounts, lends an urgency and concreteness to the issues at hand, and this episode of Voiceprint lifts up those crucial interventions and brings them to the conversation.⁵³

In part because of its unique polyvocal format, Voiceprint attracted the attention of celebrated Edmonton-based nonfiction author Myrna Kostash, who reviewed the show in a 1981 issue of The Edmonton Journal. Kostash praised the series’ collage-like format and singled out the episode in question, “Women’s Language and Literature,” for its foregrounding of feminist perspectives. In her words,

These programs are most assuredly not straightforward lectures, not a solitary patrician (male) voice droning on into the fog of the airwaves. Voiceprint is, in the jargon of electronic media, a magazine show. The format is the montage: many voices, recurring theme segments, a bit of music, readings, interviews.⁵⁴

Voiceprint’s guests were recruited from a variety of fields – linguistics, library science, media studies, and anthropology, to name a few – each offering a different perspective on the issue at hand. One of its regular contributors was University of Alberta librarian Anna Altmann. Altmann, who went on to become Director of UA’s School of Library and Information Studies, hosted a segment of Voiceprint called “Words Worth Listening To,” in which she suggested relevant books and articles for further reading based on the episode’s chosen topic. In this case, her bibliography centred on the subject of “language and the problem of sexism.”

We took Altmann’s advice and found a copy of Casey Miller and Kate Swift’s 1977 book, Words and Women: New Language in New Times, in which feminist scholars theorise how American swear words are gender-coded, arguing that “our most obscene verbal weapons also reveal the deep-seated, violent anger many men feel toward women.”⁵⁵ Miller and Swift go on to explain how the “taboo words of a language signal areas of psychic tension,” an insight that could be applied not only to profanity, but other contended linguistic fields, including the use of pronouns.⁵⁶ Britt Griffin, then a first-year law student and volunteer at the Rape Crisis Centre of Edmonton, applies this same critique by Miller and Swift specifically to the misogynistic culture reflected in the papers written by engineering students, arguing, “sexism on a more profound level engenders an entire attitude and ideology about the way the world should be and how the relationship between men and women should be…. It seems to me we do that in our language as well. All our swear words and language of violence and aggression is sexual.”⁵⁷ While we do not know whether or not Griffin listened to Voiceprint or read Miller and Swift, her argument meshes with the discoveries made and claims advanced in feminist discourse – yet another of the proto-intersectional perspectives informing the episode and one of the “voices” that resound therein.

The polyphony of “Women’s Language” created an intersectional framework for considering the voices – all the voices – informing this on-campus (and, as it turns out, national) debate on misogyny as expressed through language. The Voiceprint team’s ethical curation practise was cognisant that gendered speech was an issue that was not only a contemporary one, but part of a longer historical debate involving a multiplicity of voices and programmed the episode as such. For example, following Altmann’s sonic footnote, moving from the sound of her voice to the printed word of feminist books, we happened upon the term “testeria,” coined by feminist labour organiser Juli Loesch in an article published in the winter of 1972-73, as a play on “hysteria.”⁵⁸ Loesch’s theorisation of “testeria,” which critiques the “crippled emotional condition” of hypermasculine culture, helps to reframe the smug, superior attitude of the “rational” and “reasonable” male engineering students and their defenders, as a form of violence.⁵⁹ As she explains, the damage wrought by testeria

accounts in part for the ability of the male ruling class to efficiently, calmly, and maturely carry out planetary catastrophe. Male inventions like war, capitalism, totalitarianism, industrialism, and other atrocities are only possible if millions of efficient, calm, mature male people are diligently repressing their healthy human emotions.⁶⁰

 

Voiceprint is full of provocations akin to Altmann’s feminist bibliography that intervene in the silencing of women by inviting new voices into the conversation.

Another such voice belongs to Kolmes, whose interview on feminist editing practices is excerpted at the top of this article. She underscores the ways in which Voiceprint, by creating a space for female voices, challenged the patriarchal power structures inherent not only in media, but in academia. As heard in the interview, the debate over gendered language centred on challenging the male subject as default in the 1980s. Kolmes was at the time working as an editor for a research publication, and it was in this capacity that she was invited as a guest on Voiceprint. She was also a fierce and impassioned advocate for women’s issues: active with Edmonton’s newly-formed Alliance Against Sexual Harassment, she would later join The Women’s Legal Education Action Fund (LEAF) and go on to become a respected labour and human rights lawyer.⁶¹ In the following soundbite, she explains how male perspectives and viewpoints are reinforced through language and through our grammatical systems, such that masculine versions of words like “mankind” and “he” become the standard.

I would say now, the main problem is pronouns, use of “he” or “she” or how you’re going to use it. So far, there are three options: you can use the generic “he,” which many, many people would prefer, and I certainly do not. You can use “he-oblique-she,” which is cumbersome and various different, um, commentators in style books or magazines that go out to editors, find quite cumbersome; or, you can [use] “he or she.” Or, there’s a fourth option; I looked this up. You can change things to the plural, which I find the least problematic, although it requires a tremendous amount of work because you not only have to change your pronoun, you have to change your verb agreement. And that means that, if you’re editing a manuscript or editing an article that comes in, you have to be very, very careful that you’ve got all the agreements correct…. The problem is that there are more and more people now who don’t care what you do to their manuscript in terms of changing pronouns, and there [are] some people who care a lot and they will put up a big fuss. Then, when you say “Look, I’m trying to make an attempt to remove sexism from the language,” they will become extremely defensive and then you’re in a battle royale, and I’ve been through that.⁶²

CLIP 5: Jo-Ann Kolmes on feminist editing practices from Voiceprint (1981), on Aviary (0:17:14 – 0:18:06).

CLIP 6: Jo-Ann Kolmes on feminist editing practices from Voiceprint (1981), on Aviary (0:19:33-0:19:52).

There are many editorial considerations in this clip (which has already been edited down substantially). Notably, the grammatical changes Kolmes advocates for are still very much within the gender binary, which is typical of feminist scholarship at the time. For example, studies of sexism in language conducted by Ann Bodine, Maija Blaubergs, and Robin Lakoff in the 1970s were primarily focused on detaching women’s fundamental identity within the English language from the basic male subject. The social and political significance of language as a battleground for gender equality is also reflected in pop culture from that period. For instance, Ms. magazine, which launched in December 1981, celebrates the new, independent woman through its title. Here, once more, language is front and centre, with “Ms.” being an alternative salutation for women that did not hinge on their status as the property of either their father or their husband.

Second-wave feminists popularised more than just gender-neutral honorifics like “Ms.”; they also experimented with gender-neutral pronouns, dubbed “neopronouns” (which have seen a resurgence in recent times). In the Voiceprint interview, Kolmes cites the example of “per,” a neopronoun possibly coined by Marge Piercy in her 1976 feminist science fiction novel Woman on the Edge of Time.⁶³ “Per” was not the only attempt at establishing a non-sexist pronoun prior to the 1970s. Miller and Swift note that “thon,” a contraction of “that one” coined by the American composer Charles Converse, has been in circulation since 1859; while “thon” was recognized as late as 1959 in the Second International Edition of Webster’s Dictionary, it seems to have vanished from the popular lexicon.⁶⁴ Miller and Swift highlight more “recent proposals” for a non-sexist pronoun, including “E, hesh, po, tey, ve, xe, and jhe,” which have “been more ephemeral still.”⁶⁵ “Tey, ter, and tem,” which were used in an experiment in the University of Tennessee student newspaper, likewise failed to gain currency in popular speech, despite the conceptual demands for such words.⁶⁶ These experiments with neopronouns and their failure to “stick” underscore Kolmes’s point that pronouns, in particular, are often difficult to alter, and our general reluctance as a society to accept alternatives suggests that these deceptively “simple words” carry special social, cultural, and political meaning.

Indeed, as the Voiceprint episode suggests, there was more at stake in the debate over pronouns than making grammar more cohesive. What Kolmes gestures towards in her interview, but does not fully explicate, is how pronouns are bound up with subjectivity: usage reinforces and denies certain worldviews, which is partly why altering them generates strong emotional reactions. She describes, for instance, how her clients did not always respond well to her feminist editing practices and would “get extremely defensive” regarding the “corrections” as a personal attack. When feminist editors such as Kolmes refused to accept masculine pronouns as the standard, they were not just criticising individual authors. To shift the subject position and de-centre the male point of view was, in a larger sense, to draw attention to the way that language and power intersect. Staunch defenders of “traditional” grammar, refusing to acknowledge these dynamics, often frame the argument against reform as a matter of etiquette or “proper” speech.⁶⁷ Kolmes herself wrestles with the “awkwardness” of substituting gender-neutral pronouns for male ones. For instance, she discusses the use of “they” and how tricky it can be to make the resulting paragraph grammatically consistent:

There are about a hundred function words, they’re called, in the English language which refer to the prepositions, conjunctions. Basically, they’re words that don’t necessarily carry meaning in themselves, and when you start changing those, people become extremely uncomfortable. I was reading a passage once, which recommended that you change a noun, a common noun, to the word gwangle. So that you’d be reading “A gwangle costs 50 cents more than an apple,” something like that. Well, that’s certainly amusing but that doesn’t really jolt your consciousness. Then, the article I was reading suggested that you do the same kind of substitution in a paragraph but you change all pronouns, “he” or “she,” to the pronoun “per,” which is a substitution, a non-sexist pronoun. And of course, it reads terribly awkwardly because, in general, psychologically, we have a lot more trouble changing these very simple words that tend not to change over time; they’ve been constant in the language for quite some time. It jars the consciousness, and this is what people are reacting to. But it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. [emphasis added]⁶⁸

CLIP 7: Jo-Ann Kolmes on neopronouns from Voiceprint (1981), on Aviary 0:18:22-0:19:32.

Kolmes points out the difficulty of shifting language habits, especially those that pertain to deeply ingrained sociocultural norms. However, on reflection, her assertions about the “constan[cy]” of pronouns in the English language are somewhat exaggerated. The prescriptivist policing of grammar in an effort to foreground the masculine subject originates in the 1700s. At the same time, in a descriptivist sense – that is, how people actually use language – Miller and Swift contend that, in practice, grammatical rules about pronouns especially are far from absolute.⁶⁹ The “tremendous amount of work” that the frustrated Kolmes felt she must undertake as an editor in order to make gender neutral pronouns less grammatically “awkward” and more acceptable to her readership is emblematic of the way that pronouns have always been in flux throughout the history of the English language in response to sociocultural milieus.⁷⁰ 

Not only did women editors frequently contend with gender bias in language, but so too did women writers, as illustrated in the following exchange between Voiceprint host Balan and guest author Anne Cameron in the same episode:

BALAN: Do you object to being identified as a woman writer?

CAMERON: No, I am a woman and I am a writer. I object to being referred to as a poetess [laughs].

BALAN: Mhm.

CAMERON: Um… somehow a poet, semantically or whatever, a poet has… dignity and… an ability to use words and move people, and a poetess is hung on a hook of iambic pentameter [laughs] and nobody bothers. What does really piss me off is when someone comes up and says, “Oh, I read the thing you wrote, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta – my, you write just like a man!” And I used to choke, just choke. And now, I smile demurely and say, “Oh shit, I hope not!” [laughs].⁷¹

CLIP 8: Ann Cameron on being labelled a “poetess” from Voiceprint (1981), on Aviary (0:39:05-0:40:04).

As an act of testimony, the interview clip is powerful and compelling precisely because it is an audio object: it is emotional, intimate, and the listener feels as if they are in the same room, witnessing. Cameron smokes throughout, her voice raspy, and the extended interview tape itself is flawed in its abrupt beginning and ending. But the rawness of the recording makes the interview – and the subject of gendered language – so much more tangible to listeners. In a striking anecdote, Balan told us that, while he was interviewing Cameron in the CKUA radio studio, the studio technician ran in halfway through to exclaim how much he was moved by the interview and to ask if he could share it with his son.⁷² There is, as evident in this example, a sincerity and vulnerability to the recorded conversations captured in Voiceprint that is difficult to replicate in print. The audio clips included in this article are especially compelling because of their raw, intimate quality as aural/voiced objects that show how feminist voices continue to ring out, even within a highly male-dominated media culture.

 

Feminism from the Airwaves to the Internet, and Beyond

In considering this archive of feminist history, one must also consider how the genre impacts both the manner of telling and the way in which these stories were received. Unlike voices on air, words expressed in print could more easily be preserved and circulated, and as such were presumably more closely scrutinised. Indeed, as shown in the letters to the editor published in The Edmonton Journal and The Godiva, the argument that misogynistic speech mattered because it reinforced and was reinforced by our social institutions, including academia, was routinely dismissed as unreasonable, even unbalanced. To reiterate Kolmes’s memorable declaration in this essay’s opening epigraph: “people will laugh at you.” Reader response to stories mattered because even student-run newspapers, like The Gateway and The Godiva, still ran ads; in fact, in 1981, Canadian student newspapers launched their own ad agency.⁷³ Through circulation numbers and readers’ comments, editors could gauge how their content was being received. In contrast, campus radio hosts in the 1980s were, to an extent, broadcasting “into the ether,” as Balan put it.⁷⁴ They had no means to gauge audience metrics, nor did they actively reach out to gather listener feedback through phone-in sessions and the like. As such, the producers of Voiceprint “never had a clear sense of who, if anyone, was listening.”⁷⁵ For Balan, this was one of the attractions of producing scholarship for the campus airwaves as opposed to in a print medium, like a newspaper or a peer-reviewed journal:

To me, it’s the magic of radio. It just went out into the ether…. By and large, you’re working in the dark… and it’s kind of nice not having people that you have to cater to. You just sort of let your own curiosity just guide you, and you didn’t answer to anyone except for yourself.⁷⁶

It seems that in being abstracted from their audience, they were free to create content without fear of backlash, and to foreground voices and perspectives that were often disregarded and belittled, both in mainstream commercial media and in local, student-produced papers. Due in part to their ephemerality, shows like Voiceprint created safe spaces for marginalized communities to have frank political discussions, including conversations around sexist speech, as heard in the “Women’s Language” episode.

Of course, in rediscovering and digitising campus radio collections, the original speaker-listener dynamic invariably shifts. Researchers have the opportunity to “close listen” to once-ephemeral audio events – to stop, rewind, and play them back – and to transcribe these events into print, which opens them up to further scrutiny. As such, pulling these voices from the airwaves in the 1980s and reconstituting them in the current, digital moment, has both ethical and political implications for theories of curation. As present-day listeners of archival campus radio, one “hears time” ⁷⁷ in multiple senses. On the one hand, the discussions of sexist speech clearly resonate with the current moment; as Copeland points out in her 2018 radio documentary, “This Is the Sound of My Voice,” women’s voices are still policed down to the level of sound.⁷⁸ On the other hand, Voiceprint is a reminder of how the shape of feminist radio has changed. With the advent of podcasts, feminist content is no longer limited to the alternative airwaves of campus and community radio, with born-digital shows like Secret Feminist Agenda and The Guilty Feminist attracting sizable followings.⁷⁹ Nor are women restricted to supporting roles, as was ultimately the case with Voiceprint, regardless of how well-intentioned and supportive their male colleagues were. Today, female creators are front and centre: creating, producing, curating, and hosting shows of their own.

At the same time, unlike in the analog era of alternative radio, podcasters are not broadcasting into the void. With the availability of performance metrics, which monitor everything from the number and location of subscribers to average listening time, comes a hyper-awareness of listenership. The obscurity and ephemerality of community and campus radio could, in the past, afford marginalised communities a certain degree of anonymity and thus protection. By contrast, women on the internet today, including podcasters, are frequent targets for online vitriol and internet trolling.⁸⁰ Moreover, when activism moves online into the digital space of the world wide web, there is a risk of losing that sense of the local, and with that loss, the ability to build local, geographically-oriented political communities.⁸¹

As heard in the printed and sounded examples from this case study, the conversation around gender and language was not just shaped by established scholarly thinkers and journals, but by students and student-produced print and radio content, with the airwaves, in particular, cultivating feminist perspectives and voices. As scholar of Italian radio culture Damien Pollard puts it, community radio facilitates the “voice’s power to construct space… not just as a means of expression, but a means of insurgency.”⁸² Within these radical spaces, which have been framed here as a type of exhibition space, a community can grow organically, for this type of radio is “generated by a community” and potentially also “generates communities.”⁸³ Indeed, the group of feminist friends, allies, contributors, and listeners that Voiceprint-as-sonic-event brought together continues to grow. Now, this community includes us, the authors of this essay, and, hopefully, you, those who read it.

Future studies might look more closely at campus radio shows like Voiceprint as early, experimental forms of sonic curation that anticipated the scholarly podcasting communities of today, but at the same time, differed in significant ways, including their abstraction from audience and their fiercely local orientation. Unarchiving Voiceprint and presenting it as a curated collection that recovers the grassroots oral/aural feminist history of the sexist speech debate, is a poignant reminder that the archive itself is inherently political, and working in it can be a form of activism. We are not only rediscovering the past but carefully reconstituting the present.⁸⁴ These sounds and voices in time show both how far we have come and how much work remains to be done in making the airwaves – and our language – more equitable, inclusive, and accessible.

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1. Since Voiceprint was first broadcast, critical focus has expanded from cultural assumptions of a default maleness to include gender identity and its linguistic expression. In the four-plus decades since, developments in feminist theory have been led by what Celia Åsberg calls “theories of denaturalisation,” which challenge assumptions of gender as fixed or “natural” (Åsberg 158). See, for instance, Judith Butler’s seminal work, Gender Trouble (1990) and Myra Hird’s The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies (2009). For more on the feminist acknowledgement of ontology beyond binaries and the development of language to adapt to this reality, see: Celia Åsberg, “Feminist Posthumanities,” in Posthuman Glossary, eds. Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 158, and “Understanding Nonbinary People: How to Be Respectful and Supportive,” Advocates for Trans Equality, January 12, 2023, https://transequality.org/issues/resources/understanding-nonbinary-people-how-to-be-respectful-and-supportive. ↩

2. Jo Yurcaba, “From Drag Bans to Sports Restrictions, 75 Anti-LGBTQ Bills Have Become Law in 2023,” NBC News, December 17, 2023, https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/75-anti-lgbtq-bills-become-law-2023-rcna124250. Michael Rodriguez, “Alberta Makes Bid to Join Saskatchewan in Pronoun Law Constitutionality Fight,” The Calgary Herald, April 9, 2024,https://calgaryherald.com/news/politics/alberta-joins-saskatchewan-pronoun-law-constitutionality-fight. ↩

3. Shelley Ruth Butler and Erica Lehrer, Curatorial Dreams (Ottawa: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016), 5. ↩

4. Butler and Lehrer, Curatorial Dreams, 5. ↩

5. On feminist activism in Canadian public radio, see Barbara Freeman, “‘Suddenly, It Was a Real Thing’: The Feminist Fight for Equal Opportunities in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1971-1981,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 30, no. 2 (2019): 121-148, https://doi.org/10.7202/1074379ar. Stacey Copeland, editor, Phantom Power, “Voices Pt. 2: The Sound of My Voice,”  March 10, 2022, https://phantompod.org/ep-35-voices-pt-2-the-sound-of-my-voice-stacey-copeland/.; Erika Engstrom, “Alternative Feminist Media on the Airwaves: Radio and Women’s Music,” Journal of Radio & Audio Media 17, no. 1 (2010): 18-32, doi: 10.1080/19376521003719383.; Susan Carter, “A Mic of Her Own: Stations, Collectives, and Women’s Access to Radio,” Journal of Radio Studies 11, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 169-183, https://doi.org/10.1207/s15506843jrs1102_3.; Caroline Mitchell, “Re-Sounding Feminist Radio: A Journey through Women’s Community Radio Archives,” Feminist Media Histories 1, no. 4 (October 2015): 126-43, https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2015.1.4.126. ↩

6. “Radical feminist” was and (continues to be) a contested term. Jo-Ann Kolmes, the feminist editor in the epigraph, sees nothing radical about asking for non-sexist language in journal submissions; we, the authors, share her sentiments. As seen in letters by readers responding to The Godiva story in The Edmonton Journal and The Gateway student paper, “radical feminism” or approximations thereof was also used as a pejorative, to diminish any efforts made toward social equality. Voiceprint creators Jars Balan and Terri Wynnyk consciously sought to reclaim the term as one of empowerment, revelling in it and reminiscing about their time attending “radical feminist” poetry readings at the anarchist bookshop, Erewhon Books, in the 1980s. Most recently, “radical feminist” has been co-opted by transphobic groups, whose reification of biological essentialism is used as justification for denying trans peoples’ identities, and the term  TERF (trans-exclusive radical feminist) is now associated with exclusionary forms of feminism rooted in anti-trans bigotry. For further reading, see Cristan Williams, “TERF: What It Means and Where It Came from,” The Trans Advocate, March 15, 2014, https://www.transadvocate.com/terf-what-it-means-and-where-it-came-from_n_13066.htm. ↩

7. Butler and Lehrer, Curatorial Dreams, 6. ↩

8. Voiceprint was, in part, a product of CKUA’s new educational mandate. Six years prior, CKUA had entered into a new licensing agreement with the Alberta Educational Communications Corporation (ACCESS), heralding an era of unprecedented growth for the station. See Jean Kirkman, “CKUA: Fifty Years of Growth for the University’s Own Station,” University of Alberta Alumni Association: History Trails, March 1978, https://sites.ualberta.ca/ALUMNI/history/affiliate/78winCKUA.htm. ↩

9. “About Us,” SpokenWeb, accessed May 21, 2024, https://spokenweb.ca/about-us/spokenweb/. ↩

10. Prior to their rediscovery by the SpokenWeb team, many of these reel-to-reel and cassette tape recordings had been stored away and forgotten for decades. In some instances, the liner notes were the only clues, aside from the audio itself, as to the context. In the case of Voiceprint, in seeking to identify the unknown speakers on the tapes, we discovered that the host, Jars Balan, was still associated with the University of Alberta and living in Edmonton. Upon making contact with Balan, he generously donated to SpokenWeb boxes of supplemental material related to Voiceprint and other UAlberta campus shows, including production notes, scripts, interview questions, and additional recordings of campus radio episodes. ↩

11. David M. Berry, “The Post-Archival Constellation: The Archive under the Technical Conditions of Computational Media,” Memory in Motion: Archives, Technology and the Social, ed. Ina Blom, Trond Lundemo, and Eivind Røssaak, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), 107, https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048532063-006. ↩

12. Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod, “Introduction: Unarchiving the Literary Event,” in CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event, ed. Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019) 3, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvscxtkg.5. ↩

13. Berry, “The Post-Archival Constellation,” 107; Camlot and McLeod, “Introduction,” 3. ↩

14. Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya, producers, The SpokenWeb Podcast, season 3, episode 8, “Academics on Air,”  May 2, 2022, spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/academics-on-air. ↩

15. Camlot and McLeod, “Introduction,” 8. ↩

16. Wanda A. Wiegers, “Feminist Protest and the Regulation of Misogynist Speech: A Case Study of Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission v. Engineering Students’ Society,” Ottawa Law Review 24, no. 2 (1992): 372, canlii.ca/t/29dw. ↩

17. Andrea Seale, “Hardly Good Clean Fun,” The Gateway, January 20, 1981, University of Alberta Archives, Peel’s Prairie Provinces Collection, https://archive.org/details/GAT_1981012001/page/4/mode/2up. ↩

18. Despite our best efforts, we were unable to find an original copy of the January 1981 issue of The Godiva. Our SpokenWeb Edmonton colleague, Zach Morrison, visited the University of Alberta Archives and learned that The Bridge and The Godiva were both published by the Engineering Students’ Society. The former is published monthly and the latter runs only during Engineering Week (now called GEER Week), which takes place every January. Unfortunately, neither of the two boxes of archived engineering student newspapers that we located contained the inflammatory January 1981 issue of The Godiva. Box 5 only contained issues of The Bridge, and Box 6 contained several copies of The Godiva, but only from recent years. In an email, Morrison remarked to us, “After having read the 2004 issue, I can confirm that it is incredibly crude and offensive. It pretty much exclusively contains misogynistic and racist articles. And this is the 2004 issue; I can’t imagine what the 1981 issue is like… The Bridge also contains offensive material but is a bit more tame than The Godiva.” Zach Morrison, email message to authors, May 3, 2022. ↩

19. See also Katherine Dedyna, “Protest Lodged over Article Outlining Rape of Girls,” The Edmonton Journal, January 14, 1981; “Students Sorry for Disgusting Article,” The Edmonton Journal, January 13, 1981; Kent Blinston, “By Degrees,” The Edmonton Journal, January 15, 1981; “Engineering Paper Problem Nationwide,” The Sheaf, October 7, 1981, The University of Saskatchewan Archives, The Sheaf Online, digital.scaa.sk.ca/gallery/sheaf/browse.php?CurrentYear=&CurrentIssue=1981-10-07. ↩

20. Jo-Ann Kolmes, interview by Chelsea Miya and Ariel Kroon, August 19, 2022. ↩

21. The editors of The Godiva/The Bridge only apologised for publishing “Pediophiliology” after the public outcry, and not before thumbing their nose at those who found the article offensive. The lyrics to a satirical song, described as sung to the tune of “Godiva’s Hymn,” or the famous “Engineers’ Drinking Song,” appeared in the January issue: “It started with GODIVA and an article so crude/ There is some talk the engineers be punished and be sued/ Human Rights and Rape Crisis and the whole damn nasty bunch/ Want to be sure to get their ways by throwing one more punch.” See Dave Woodhouse, “A Tribute to Engineering Week,” The Bridge, January 1981. ↩

22. See Britt Griffin, “Sexism, Aggression and Oppression,” interview by Nina Miller, The Gateway, January 22, 1981, The University of Alberta Archives, Peel’s Prairie Provinces Collection, https://archive.org/details/GAT_1981012201/page/8/mode/2up. ↩

23. Nina Miller, “Engineering Week: An Inside View,” The Gateway, January 20, 1981, The University of Alberta Archives, Peel’s Prairie Provinces, https://archive.org/details/GAT_1981012001/page/8/mode/2up. ↩

24. Bob Driver, “Godiva Furor Out of Control,” letter to the editor, The Gateway, January 20, 1981, The University of Alberta Archives, Peel’s Prairie Provinces, https://archive.org/details/GAT_1981012001/page/4/mode/2up. ↩

25. Terry Hahn, “In Engineering Week’s Defence,” letter to the editor, The Edmonton Journal, January 23, 1981; Wayne Sissons, “Don’t Stereotype Engineering Students,” letter to the editor, The Edmonton Journal, January 24, 1981; Vern Konelsky, “Nitpicking about Engineers Annual Event,” letter to the editor, The Edmonton Journal, January 24, 1981. ↩

26. Jars Balan, “Linguistic Taboos in Speech and Writing,” unaired episode, Voiceprint, CKUA, Calgary, April 8, 1983. ↩

27. Freeman, “‘Suddenly, It Was a Real Thing,’” 128. ↩

28. See Carter, “A Mic of Her Own.” ↩

29. Freeman, “‘Suddenly, It Was a Real Thing,’” 137. ↩

30. Roy Shields, “Between the National and The Journal, There Is an On-Air Sisterhood,” Toronto Star, May 27, 1982. Quoted in Freeman, “Suddenly, It Was a Real Thing,” 137. ↩

31. Carter, “A Mic of Her Own,” 172. ↩

32. Stacey Copeland, interview by Chelsea Miya, February 2, 2022. ↩

33. Jars Balan and Terri Wynnyk, “SpokenWeb Podcast Listening Party: Season 3 Episode 8 – Academics on Air,” SpokenWeb, May 2, 2022. ↩

34. George Melnyk, “About Books,” The Edmonton Journal, June 29, 1978; Myrna Kostash, “Book View,” The Edmonton Journal, January 17, 1981; James Adams, “Erewhon Books Occupied Unique Niche for 12 Years,” The Edmonton Journal, November 25, 1984. ↩

35. Freeman, “‘Suddenly, It Was a Real Thing,’” 135. ↩

36. Balan and Wynnyk, “SpokenWeb Podcast Listening Party.” ↩

37. Terri Wynnyk, in discussion with the authors, , January 7, 2022. ↩

38. Wynnyk, in discussion with the authors, January 7, 2022. ↩

39. Wynnyk, in discussion with the authors, January 7, 2022. ↩

40. Wynnyk, in discussion with the authors, January 7, 2022. ↩

41. See, for instance, Laurie Spiegel’s mesmerizing performance on the Alles synth at Bell Labs in 1977, one of the first examples of digital music; Laurie Spiegel, “Laurie Spiegel plays Alles synth – temporary replacement,” April 27, 2009, YouTube,  https://youtu.be/NChqEEz31eE. ↩

42. Judy Collins, “Bread and Roses,” Bread and Roses, Elektra Records, 1976. ↩

43. Butler and Lehrer, Curatorial Dreams, 8. ↩

44. Butler and Lehrer, Curatorial Dreams, 8. ↩

45. Viola Thimm, Mayurakshi Chaudhuri, and Sarah J. Mahler, “Enhancing Intersectional Analyses with Polyvocality: Making and Illustrating the Model,” Social Sciences 6, no. 2 (2017): 1, doi.org/10.3390/socsci6020037. ↩

46. Hélène Cixous, Keith Cohen, and Paula Cohen, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 883, doi.org/10.1086/493306. ↩

47. Anne Carson, “The Gender of Sound,” Glass, Irony, and God (New Directions, 1995), 124. ↩

48. Carson, “The Gender of Sound,” 121. ↩

49. The modernist actress, occultist, and feminist Florence Farr, writes of a conscious use of gender archetypes in her notes on alchemy in the Collectanea Hermetica. Renaissance and modern alchemy alike owe much to Plato’s “Table of Opposites,” though, unlike what we see in Carson’s article on the “Gender of Sound,” the occult world holds space for an appreciation of femininity, as symbolised by the moon. A patriarchal society devalues lunar, “feminine”, traits in favour of their solar “opposites,” but an enlightened perspective understands the need for both archetypes, and that each comes in its turn, in a cycle, or even a spectrum. See Florence Farr, “Notes by S. S. D. D.,” Collectanea Hermetica, Volume III: A Short Inquiry Concerning the Hermetic Art by a Lover of Philalethes, ed. William Wynn Westcott (Theosophical Publishing Society, 1894): 46. ↩

50. “Feminist killjoy” is Sara Ahmed’s term that “helps to make sense of how [women] become the problem for pointing out the problem, or how naming violence can mean [they] end up being treated as the cause of it.” See: Sara Ahmed, “Home,” feministkilljoys, December 31, 2023, https://feministkilljoys.com. ↩

51. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality, More than Two Decades Later,” News from Columbia Law, June 8, 2017, https://www.law.columbia.edu/news/archive/kimberle-crenshaw-intersectionality-more-two-decades-later. See also Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum(1989): 139–67. ↩

52. See Riley Wilson, “Zines, Polyvocality, and Sound: How Modernist First-Wave Feminism Inspired Riot Grrrl,” Virginia Woolf and the World of Books, eds. Nicola Wilson and Claire Battershill (Liverpool:Liverpool University Press, 2018), 220-225, doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv69tgk4. ↩

53. Other Voiceprint episodes include “Hebrew, Jewish, and Yiddish Writing” (February 11, 1981); “Ukrainian Language and Literature” (March 25, 1981); “Japanese Language and Literature” (May 13, 1981); “Cree Language and Culture” (June 3, 1981); and other episodes focusing on diverse linguistic and cultural groups in and around Edmonton. Each episode adhered to the same polyvocal format and included soundbites and interviews from guest experts from the particular community of focus for that week. The content of this week’s episode on women’s language and literature is far from exceptional. ↩

54. Myrna Kostash, “Book View,” The Edmonton Journal, January 26, 1980. ↩

55. Casey Miller and Kate Swift, Words and Women: New Language for New Times (Anchor, 1977), 110. ↩

56. Miller and Swift, Words and Women, 110. ↩

57. Griffin, “Sexism, Aggression and Oppression.” ↩

58. Juli Loesch, “Testeria and Penisolence: A Scourge to Humankind,” Aphra 4, no.1 (Winter 1972-1973): 43-45. ↩

59. Loesch, “Testeria and Penisolence,” 43-45. ↩

60. Loesch, “Testeria and Penisolence,” 43-45. ↩

61. Kolmes worked on the landmark Vriend vs. Alberta LGBTQ+ rights case. As a result of the 1998 Supreme Court decision, sexual orientation was officially recognized as one of the categories protected from discrimination under Canadian human rights law. See Vriend v. Alberta, [1998] 1 SCR 493; Paula Simons, “How the Vriend Case Established LGBTQ Rights 20 Years Ago in Alberta,” The Edmonton Journal, March 15, 2018, https://edmontonjournal.com/news/insight/paula-simons-how-the-vriend-case-established-lgbtq-rights-20-years-ago-in-alberta-and-across-canada. ↩

62. Kolmes, “Voiceprint: Women’s Language and Literature,” 0:17:14 – 0:18:06; 0:19:33 – 0:19:52. ↩

63. We attempted to find a corresponding academic reference in English to “per” outside of Piercy, but were unsuccessful. ↩

64. Miller and Swift, Words and Women, 117. ↩

65. Miller and Swift, Words and Women, 117. ↩

66. Miller and Swift, Words and Women, 118. ↩

67. For a fuller description of feminist and anti-feminist discourse around language reform circa 1980, see Maija S. Blaubergs, “An Analysis of Classic Arguments against Changing Sexist Language,” Women’s Studies International Quarterly 3, no. 2-3 (1980): 142-147, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0148-0685(80)92071-0. ↩

68. Kolmes, “Voiceprint: Women’s Language and Literature,” 0:18:24-0:19:32. ↩

69. Miller and Swift, Words and Women, 121. ↩

70. See, for example, Miller and Swift, Words and Women, 121-124; Ann Bodine, “Androcentrism in Prescriptive Grammar: Singular ‘They’, Sex-Indefinite ‘He’, and ‘He or She,” Language in Society 4, no. 2 (1975): 129–146, doi.org/10.1215/00031283-3509469.; Abigail C. Saguy, and Juliet A. Williams, “A Little Word that Means a Lot: A Reassessment of Singular They in a New Era of Gender Politics,” Gender & Society 36, no. 1 (Feb. 2022): 7, doi.org/10.1177/08912432211057921. ↩

71. Anne Cameron, “Interview: Jars Balan and Anne Cameron,” interview by Jars Balan, Voiceprint, Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, March 4, 1981, 0:39:05 – 0:40:04, University of Alberta Library Aviary Online, SpokenWeb UAlberta, ualberta.aviaryplatform.com/r/hh6c24rh8s. ↩

72. Jars Balan, in discussion with the authors, May 24, 2021. ↩

73. Jim McElgunn, “Students Form Own Ad Agency,” The Gateway, January 6, 1981, University of Alberta Archives, Peel’s Prairie Provinces Collection, https://archive.org/details/GAT_1981010601/mode/2up. ↩

74. Jars Balan, in discussion with the authors, January 4, 2022. ↩

75. Kroon, Beauchesne, and Miya, “Academics on Air.” ↩

76. Balan, in discussion with the authors, January 4, 2022. ↩

77. The SpokenWeb Network, “The Sound of Literature in Time: A Graduate Symposium,” Concordia University, Montreal, May 16-17, 2022, https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/spokenweb-symposium-2022. ↩

78. Copeland, “Sound of My Voice”. See also Terry Gross, host, Fresh Air, “From Upspeak to Vocal Fry: Are We ‘Policing’ Young Women’s Voices?” NPR, July 23, 2015, npr.org/2015/07/23/425608745/from-upspeak-to-vocal-fry-are-we-policing-young-womens-voices. ↩

79. Hannah McGregor, host, Secret Feminist Agenda, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2017-2021, secretfeministagenda.com. Deborah Frances-White, host, The Guilty Feminist, The Spontaneity Shop, 201), guiltyfeminist.com. ↩

80. For recent studies of online harassment, see Amnesty International, “#Toxictwitter: Violence and Abuse Against Women Online,” Amnesty International, 2018, https://amnesty.org/en/documents/act30/8070/2018/en/; “Online Nation,” Ofcom, 2022, https://ofcom.org.uk/research-and-data/internet-and-on-demand-research/online-nation. ↩

81. On the drawbacks of web-based activism, see Stuart W Shulman, The Internet Still Might (but Probably Won’t) Change Everything: Stakeholder Views on the Future of Electronic Rulemaking (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, University Center for Social and Urban Research, 2004); Matthew Hindman, The Myth of Digital Democracy (Lexington Books, 2009), doi: 10.1515/9781400837496; Antonia Malchik, “The Problem With Social-Media Protests,” The Atlantic, May 6, 2019, theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/05/in-person-protests-stronger-online-activism-a-walking-life/578905/. For counter-arguments that point to the effectiveness of mobilising political action online, see Hedy Greijdanus et al., “The Psychology Of Online Activism and Social Movements: Relations Between Online and Offline Collective Action,” Current Opinion in Psychology 35 (2020): 49-54, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2020.03.003; James Dennis, Beyond Slacktivism: Political Participation on Social Media, (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00844-4. ↩

82. Damien Pollard, “Radio Alice and Italy’s Movement of 1977: Polyvocality, Sonority and Space,” Sound Studies 7, no. 2 (2021): 169-170, https://doi.org/10.1080/20551940.2020.1759979. ↩

83. Pollard, “Radio Alice,” 159. ↩

84. For more on archival practices of care, see T.L. Cowan and Jasmine Rault, “Onlining Queer Acts: Digital Research Ethics and Caring for Risky Archives,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 28, no. 2 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2018.1473985. ↩

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Article: Creative Commons NonCommerical 4.0 International License.

Issue images produced by the media installation All We'd Ever Need Is One Another (2018) by Adam Basanta.