Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture

Childbirth, like war, is loud. Writing this introduction in early 2022, with our minds on the intersections between music, sound, and maternity, we cannot help but be affected by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. We read daily news reports of women going into labor and giving birth in Soviet-era bunkers and crumbling basements amid the sonic backdrop of missiles, air raid sirens, and the voices and cries of others taking cover.¹ A magnified heartbeat through a stethoscope; medical staff giving instructions; a mother's screams; a baby's first cry—these sounds people have experienced worldwide across the centuries, and are imminently associated with cyclical reproduction. As Gavin Steingo notes, "Sound participates in constituting, generating, and producing new entities—including life itself."² But alongside these reproductive sounds of new life emerging in Ukraine today exist destructive soundscapes that silence maternal experience more broadly.

Experiences of maternal reproduction and birth have long "cried out" for their own sonic spaces. During pregnancy, the sound of a heartbeat, as mediated through a stethoscope or sonogram, can define the relationship between the future [End Page 68] baby and mother, even many weeks before the mother feels fetal movement.³ Birth practitioners and music therapists have widely recognized the significance of sound to the experience of maternity and birth, but cultural historians of music and sound have yet to engage with this topic in a sustained way.⁴ In putting this special issue together, we hope to identify a disciplinary silencing of the significance of sound to maternal experience, and to encourage space for such gaps to be heard across the various interdisciplinary branches of music and sound studies.

In the Anglo-American world, there is a growing public interest in pregnancy, birth, and maternity. Popular culture has progressively embraced open discussions of motherhood, as the plethora of contemporary books, podcasts, magazine articles, and social media networking on this topic demonstrates.⁵ As Amy Westervelt writes in The Guardian, "The topic of motherhood is having a bit of a moment. … Most surprising to me, as someone told by women's magazine [End Page 69] editors for years, 'we don't cover motherhood,' is the fact that publications like Elle and Marie Claire appear to have lifted their long-standing ban on motherhood."⁶ Indeed, as Pragwa Agarwal notes, society has become obsessed with women's bodies and fertility.⁷ In the even more recent context of the US Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, issues around silencing women's maternal bodies will continue to become all the more pressing.

This newfound interest in pregnancy, maternity, and parenthood is possibly due to recent attempts to untangle pregnancy and birth from male-dominated medicalized discourses in which the voices of pregnant people have long been suppressed.⁸ Beyond mainstream media aimed toward cis, heterosexual "mothers," the social sciences have largely dominated intersectional cultural and economic understandings of birth and maternity.⁹ Feminist studies has, for decades, wrestled with these topics in relation to issues around freedom of choice, establishing motherhood as a structuring category, with clear distinctions between biological and social motherhood.¹⁰ More recently, with advances in commercially available assisted reproductive technologies, feminist discourse has also pointed to ways in which new forms of social control are continually (re)established over female reproduction.¹¹ With a few exceptions, however, the humanities have largely ignored maternity, reinforcing a structural silencing of conversations around reproduction, birth, and motherhood in general.¹² [End Page 70]

When we first envisioned this special issue we were new mothers ourselves, navigating the challenges of pregnancy, birth, and parenting during the early days of COVID-19 lockdowns, and questioning how sound has long been used as a way to mediate maternal and reproductive agency. As our training and experience lies in Anglo-American historical musicology, we were acutely aware of the substantial lack of perspectives on maternity from music historiography: echoing Susan McClary, Western culture in general and musicology in particular have long "avoided dealing with the dynamic moment of birth."¹³ As such, there is enormous scope for cultural musicology to create room for the idea of sonic maternity and...