Electric Ladies in Playback

Abstract

Playback, the process of separately recording actors’ images and voices in cinema and media, has a long history of cultural stereotyping. This article analyses how performers are typecast when media technicians manipulate sound/image synchronisation in lip sync and dubbing. Inspired by Janelle Monáe’s oeuvre, I focus my study through the figure of the electric lady - female simulacra who are programmed by heteronormative, patriarchal operators. I trace the electric lady back to talking machines (Faber’s Euphonia) and early phonograph recordings (minstrelsy and opera singer Agnes Davis) to show how proto- and post-phonographic notions of playback are bound up with racialised and gendered stereotypes. Drawing on the work of Alice Maurice, Mary Ann Doane, Jennifer Fleeger, and others, I illustrate how industrial practices of playback reproduce the sounds and images of ideal femininity and obedient Others. In her ‘emotion picture’ Dirty Computer (2018), Monáe transforms history’s electric lady from obstinate object to empowered subject by unmasking homogenising operations of playback. Monáe lip syncs as multiple personae to showcase the material heterogeneity of her Black, queer, and feminist identities. Ultimately, Monáe’s hybrid personae mobilise Doane’s notion of the masquerade in their defiance of playback norms that would bind Monáe to racialised and gendered images.