Page 87 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

72 Lotte Hoek

and yelp, creating a voice “thick with body” (Silverman 1988, 62). Kaja
Silverman has suggested in The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in
Psychoanalysis and Cinema that in the cinema “the female body is made to
speak in place of the female voice . . .” (1988, 70). In contemporary
Bangladeshi cinema this collapse of the female voice into the body is par-
adoxically accompanied with a radical disjoining of female bodies and
voices. The female voices that are heard do not often belong to the female
bodies that are seen on screen. Female sound artists are used to supply the
voices for actresses. This, however, is not the case for actors, who mostly
provide their own voices to their characters. For the generation of voice,
gender-differentiated divisions of cinematic labor seem to be a requirement
in Bangladesh.
In contemporary Bangladeshi popular cinema, all sound, including all
dialogue, is recorded after the first rough cut of the film has been made.
Not a single sound is recorded during the shooting of the film; not even a
general recording of the dialogues, or guide track, is made. The film is shot
completely silently. After editing the rushes to a rough cut, the image reels
are transferred to recording studios where all dialogues, Foley sounds and
background music are recorded. Bangladeshi filmmakers and sound tech-
nicians assume that “filmic sound space, like the image space, will be con-
structed” (Lastra 2000, 133). How this is constructed then becomes a
fertile field for social scientific research. Why are certain voices matched to
certain bodies? Why is there a gender-differentiated division of sound
labor? How are class and religious community implicated in the produc-
tion of this cinematic enunciation? Why dub a cinema actress with the
voice of a dubbing artist?
While these questions may be partially answered from the particular
production context of Bangladeshi mainstream cinema in the early twenty-
first century, I would like to argue that the practice of dubbing female
voices relates crucially to the ways in which female Muslim artists caught
up in processes of technological reproduction manage their public avail-
ability. As I have argued elsewhere (Hoek 2008), I regard porda, commonly
understood as practices of female seclusion or concealment within South
Asia (Jeffery 1979; Souza 2004), as a range of practices by which the female

body can become present in the public realm. Once caught up in processes
of technological reproduction, women reconfigure the ways in which they
become available to both the technology that records them and the mass
audience to which their image and sounds are then transmitted.
In this chapter, I will discuss the composite of sound and image pro-
duced for Bangladeshi screen heroines. First, I will argue that this com-
posite constitutes a form of porda as the management of the sensory
relationship between the female artists, embedded in a Muslim and