Page 104 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

“More Sexpression Please!” 89

city college equates with a breeding ground of lax moral standards. The
dense network of associations between the city, modernity, Westernization,
immodesty, and lax morals is perpetually invoked in these films. The female
characters in the film will eventually be shown to indeed be corrupted thus,
often in song sequences and pornographic scenes. The controversies sur-
rounding an actress such as Jenny, bring such associations to an action film
from the outset. However, its pleasure can only be fulfilled if Jenny’s own
voice is edited out. What results from the joining of Jenny’s body with
Shima’s voice plays directly with fantasies about the sexually available and
transgressive middle-class woman.
This is the fantasy that film producers attempt to construct in the dub-
bing studios. They do so by asking the “clear” voiced Shima to give her
voice “more sexpression.” Her voice marked by a middle-class upbringing
and education is underscored by female viscerality through a high pitch
and repeated sighs, yelps, cries, and other nondiscursive noises. Kaja
Silverman sees in classical Hollywood cinema the tendency to a “subordi-
nation of the female voice to the female body” (1988, 68). She shows “the
importance of the female mouth . . . as a generator of gender-differentiated
and erotically charged sounds” (67) through which “the female body is
made to speak in place of the female voice” (70). What Linda Williams
remarks for pornography, that “[a]urally, excess is marked by recourse not
to the coded articulations of language but to inarticulate cries of plea-
sure . . .” (1991, 4), could be applied to most of Shima’s dubbing work. Her
cultured voice is shot through with yelps and sighs, her “voice thick with
body” (1989, 62), thus constituting with the image of Jenny’s body, the
phantasmatic female of Bangladeshi popular cinema as an ideologically
soothing ideal of real gender difference (the female as flesh) as well as
thereby making her available for erotic consumption. Jenny’s clearly
marked voice would not be able to fulfil this double task. And thus the
image of her body is accompanied by the voice of another.

Conclusion

In this chapter I have tried to answer the question why the voices of
Bangladeshi cinema actresses are generally dubbed by female dubbing art-
ists. Seeing for men such strictures do not apply, I have suggested that this
question went beyond the money-saving logic that dominates film produc-
tion. Instead, answering this question has provided insight into the ways in
which community, morality, and gender combined to make the female
body available in processes of technological reproduction.