The gendered experience of voice in Canadian radio and beyond: Toronto, Canada

Feminist media scholars have historically centered gender and identity on the body and visual texts, with the voice exercised as metaphor - immaterial or interpreted solely as the words spoken. Representative of agency, the voice gets defined as what is being said rather than how one is saying it. My thesis addresses this gap through an earoriented analysis of women’s voice within the Canadian radio and podcasting industry. Centred on the experiences of individual women in Toronto’s broadcast soundscape, I bring a feminist phenomenological approach to my work to explore the intersection of voice as both material sound -an extension of the body and thus individual identities- and the weight of the women’s voice as politically and historically coded. I aim to expand my work beyond the individual experiences of the women within the broadcast industry and into the broader discourse surrounding gendered representation for the future of our Canadian media soundscape.