Abstract

This audio paper focuses on the historical scold’s bridle: a torture instrument invented in the Late Middle Ages and used by European men to silence European women and enslaved Africans. The foundational sound of the paper is a monotonous low-range feedback recording that emerged in an experimental set-up consisting of a scold’s bridle replica, contact microphone, and speaker system. On top of this feedback sound, a voice-over reflects on lessons learned from the object’s performative resonances beyond muting the human voice. First, the voice-over narrates an autoethnographic account of wearing the scold’s bridle replica, which has provided insights about experiences of self-amplification and inward feedback. Second, the paper argues for its feedback sound as a space for critical fabulation: a domain for imagining the ideas, wisdoms, and jokes that bridled bodies could not utter without necessarily filling that gap with words. Third, the constantly humming scold’s bridle as sound one can potentially get used to is related to the gender normative as that which seems natural but is culturally constructed. Lastly, the paper finishes by theorizing gender performativity through a posthumanist frame, for which the performative is conceptualized as resonance emerging in-between the human and nonhuman.