Resonance: Vocalizing Gender, Affect, and Activism in Contemporary French Slam Poetry

Dr. Andrea Jonsson, Georgia Institute of Technology

4:00 CENTRAL TIME

In her talk, Andrea Jonsson examines slam and hip-hop artists in French and Francophone societies that focus on unveiling and eradicating everyday racism, misogyny, and violence targeted at womxn and girls. She performs a musico-cultural analysis of the concept of gendered resonance—as amplification, disturbance, and regenerative vibrational energy. The artists presented use their amplified voices to engage with social justice as it applies to race and gender. Algerian slam poet, photographer, and performance artist Zoulikha, known by her stage name “Toute Fine,” slam poet and activist Diariata N’Diaye, rapper Chilla (Maréva Ranarivelo), and hip-hop artist Lous and the Yakuza (Marie-Pierra Kakoma) demonstrate that to challenge the marginalized status of female subjectivities, artists must reclaim and expand soundscapes dominated by men.

Dr. Andrea Jonsson is Assistant Professor of French at The Georgia Institute of Technology. She received her Bachelor’s in Music from McGill University and her PhD in French from the University of Pittsburgh. Her research explores voice, sound, and poetics in the play between textuality and orality in contemporary performance poetry, theatre, music, and pop culture. She has recently published on humor and feminism, menstruation and activism in graphic narratives, women’s acousmatic voices, slam poetry, and musical figures of vulnerability in The French Review, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Modern and Contemporary France, Essays in French Literature and Culture, L’Esprit Créateur, Cincinnati Romance Review, and has forthcoming publications in The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect and University of Wales Press in a volume entitled Women in Power in French and Francophone contexts. She also has a forthcoming co-authored book (with Heather Warren-Crow, Texas Tech University) that examines performative responses to Tiqqun's Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl. Her current book project, De Vive Voix is an interdisciplinary examination of French-speaking women’s amplified cis- and trans-voices in six different areas: digital assistance, documentary, performance poetry, stand-up comedy, and conversation podcasts, and demonstrates how the wide-ranging use of amplification technologies allows female subjectivities to reclaim soundscapes dominated by men. Register online below