In 2009, Susan Boyle's debut roused Simon Cowell from his grumbling slumber on the television show "Britain's Got Talent" and viewers across the world rallied to the side of the unemployed, older woman with the voice of a trained Broadway star. In Mismatched Women, author Jennifer Fleeger argues that the shock produced when Boyle began to sing belies cultural assumptions about how particular female bodies are supposed to sound. Boyle is not an anomaly, but instead belongs to a lineage of women whose voices do not "match" their bodies by conventional expectations, from George Du Maurier's literary Trilby to Metropolitan Opera singer Marion Talley, from Snow White and Sleeping Beauty to Kate Smith and Deanna Durbin. Mismatched Women tells a new story about female representation in film by theorizing a figure regularly dismissed as an aberration. The mismatched woman is a stumbling block for both sound and feminist theory, argues Fleeger, because she has been synchronized yet seems to have been put together incorrectly, as if her body could not possibly house the voice that the camera insists belongs to her. Fleeger broadens the traditionally cinematic context of feminist psychoanalytic film theory to account for literary, animated, televisual, and virtual influences. This approach bridges gaps between disciplinary frameworks, showing that studies of literature, film, media, opera, and popular music pose common questions about authenticity, vocal and visual realism, circulation, and reproduction. The book analyzes the importance of the mismatched female voice in historical debates over the emergence of new media and unravels the complexity of female representation in moments of technological change.

About the Author
Jennifer Fleeger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at Ursinus College where she teaches courses in the film studies program. Her first book, Sounding American: Hollywood, Opera, and Jazz, also appears in Oxford's Music/Media Series.

Reviews
an exciting book ... a must-read for anyone interested in musical women, performance studies, and media culture ... its critical connections between opera and pop music, and women and media, are original and important, and appear together for the first time. * Marcia J. Citron, Music and Letters *
Mismatched Women sings with intelligence, originality, and depth. * Claudia Gorbman, co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics *
Fleeger complicates previous theories of the female voice, rethinking the 'match' between sound and body, technology and voice. Linking seemingly disparate singers and modes of performance - ranging from opera to animated film to radio and reality TV - Fleeger shows the way in which mismatched women challenge gender stereotypes and mechanisms of pity associated with having, or being, the wrong body. * Pamela Wojcik, Director of Gender Studies and Professor of Film at the University of Notre Dame *



Book Information
ISBN 9780199936915
Author Jennifer Fleeger
Format Paperback
Page Count 264
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 363g
Dimensions(mm) 155mm * 231mm * 20mm