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“The Silent Partner”: Tonearms and Modular Masculinities in U.S. Midcentury Hi-Fi Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 June 2022

Kelli Smith-Biwer
Kelli Smith-Biwer*
Affiliation:
College of Arts and Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
*
Email: kelli.smith.biwer@gmail.com
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Abstract

Advertisements for audio equipment in midcentury magazines, such as High Fidelity and HiFi Review, shaped the constructions that determined how masculinity was modeled, embodied, and fashioned in the United States at midcentury. A hi-fi setup was a material expression of self and masculinity that could be ever tweaked, refashioned, and adjusted. Tonearms, however, were (and still are) delicate, troublesome, and, when improperly calibrated, capable of destroying record grooves. Manufacturers, advertisers, and magazine contributors who strategically gendered other technologies as masculine—such as amplifiers and speakers—struggled to imbue tonearms with the same virility, toughness, and power. If the hi-fi system served as an embodied simulacrum of the masculine self, then the tonearm was a necessary and omni-present symbolic point of gendered questioning in masculine identity formation. In this article, I argue that the tonearm is a site of fluidity and ambiguity within a modular masculine system, and I demonstrate that the discourses around tonearms in 1950s hi-fi magazines provide an alternative window into discussions of gender and sexuality in United States print culture. Through image analysis and close reading of advertisements and equipment reviews, I decentralize hegemonic masculinity and make room for readings that draw upon feminist and queer theory. More broadly, I submit that mid-twentieth-century hi-fi discourses do not produce a single brand of anxiously conforming maleness, but rather an array of modular masculinities.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , August 2022 , pp. 319 - 342
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for American Music

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References

References

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Perlman, Marc. “Golden Ears and Meter Readers: The Contest for Epistemic Authority in Audiophilia.” Social Studies of Science 34, no. 5 (2004): 783–807.10.1177/0306312704047613CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rodgers, Tara. “Tinkering with Cultural Memory: Gender and the Politics of Synthesizer Historiography.” Feminist Media Histories 1, no. 4 (2015): 5–30.10.1525/fmh.2015.1.4.5CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schroeder, Jonathan E. and Zwick, Detlev. “Mirrors of Masculinity: Representation and Identity in Advertising Images.” Consumption, Markets and Culture 7, no. 1 (2004): 21–52.10.1080/1025386042000212383CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sterne, Jonathan. “The Stereophonic Spaces of Soundscape.” In Living Stereo: Histories and Cultures of Multichannel Sound. Edited by Théberge, Paul, Devine, Kyle, and Everett, Tom, 67–83. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.Google Scholar
Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sounds Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Thompson, Emily. “Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity: Marketing the Edison Phonograph in America, 1877–1925.” The Musical Quarterly 79, no. 1 (1995): 131–71.10.1093/mq/79.1.131CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vágnerová, Lucie. “‘Nimble Fingers’ in Electronic Music: Rethinking Sounds Through Neo-colonial Labour.” Organised Sound 22, no. 2 (2017): 250–58.10.1017/S1355771817000152CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Better Homes and GardensGoogle Scholar
HiFi & Music ReviewGoogle Scholar
HiFi ReviewGoogle Scholar
High FidelityGoogle Scholar
Vanity FairGoogle Scholar
Slattery, John dir. Mad Men. Season 5, episode 5, “Signal 30.” Written by Frank Pierson and Matthew Weiner. Aired April 15, 2012, on AMC.Google Scholar
Ahmed, Sara. “Toward a Queer Phenomenology.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4 (2006): 543–74.10.1215/10642684-2006-002CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Anderson, Tim J. Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American Recording. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Bartmanski, Dominik and Woodward, Ian. “The Vinyl: The Analogue Medium in the Age of Digital Reproduction.” Journal of Consumer Culture 15, no. 1 (2015): 3–27.10.1177/1469540513488403CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bohlman, Andrea and McMurray, Peter. “Tape: Or, Rewinding the Phonographic Regime.” Twentieth-Century Music 14, no. 1 (2017): 3–24.10.1017/S1478572217000032CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bowes, H. Angus. “Psychopathology of the Hi-Fi Addict.” Diseases of the Nervous System 18, no. 6 (1957): 232–35.Google ScholarPubMed
Brett, Philip. “Musicality, Essentialism, and the Closet.” In Queering the Pitch, edited by Brett, Philip, Wood, Elizabeth, and Thomas, Gary C., 9–26. New York: Routledge, 2006.Google Scholar
Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Vintage Books, 2003.Google Scholar
Connell, R. W. and Messerschmidt, James W.. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.” Gender & Society 19 (2005): 829–59.10.1177/0891243205278639CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cusick, Suzanne. “On a Lesbian Relationship with Music: A Serious Effort Not to Think Straight.” In Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, edited by Brett, Philip, Wood, Elizabeth, and Thomas, Gary C., 67–83. 2nd edition. New York: Routledge, 2006.Google Scholar
Demetriou, Demetrakis Z. “Connell's Concept of Hegemonic Masculinity: A Critique.” Theory and Society 30 (2001): 337–61.10.1023/A:1017596718715CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Douglas, Susan J. Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books, 1988.Google Scholar
Grajeda, Tony. “The ‘Sweet Spot’: The Technology of Stereo and the Field of Auditorship.” In Living Stereo: Histories and Cultures of Multichannel Sound, edited by Théberge, Paul, Devine, Kyle, and Everett, Tom, 37–64. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.10.5040/9781501309090.ch-001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Halberstam, Jack. Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Halberstam, Jack. Wildness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.Google Scholar
Harris, Dianne. “A Tiny Orchestra in the Living Room.” Places Journal, April 2015. https://doi.org/10.22269/150413CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.10.1007/978-1-349-18995-3CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, Alisha Lola. Flaming?: The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.10.1093/oso/9780190065416.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Katz, Mark. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. Rev. edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.10.1525/9780520947351CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Katz, Mark. “Beware of Gramomania: The Pleasures and Pathologies of Record Collecting.” In The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, edited by Schoonmaker, Trevor, 62–65. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Katz, Mark. “The Persistence of Analogue.” In Musical Listening in the Age of Technological Production, edited by Borio, Gianmario, 375–87. New York: Routledge, 2015.Google Scholar
Keightley, Keir. “‘Turn it Down!’ She Shrieked: Gender, Domestic Space, and High Fidelity, 1948–59.” Popular Music 15, no. 2 (1996): 147–77.10.1017/S0261143000008096CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keightley, Keir. “Low Television, High Fidelity: Taste and the Gendering of Home Entertainment Technologies.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 47, no. 2 (2003): 236–59.10.1207/s15506878jobem4702_5CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kheshti, Roshanak. Modernity's Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music. New York: New York University Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
King, Thomas A. The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750, Volume 2: Queer Articulations. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Kruse, Holly. “Early Audio Technology and Domestic Space.” Stanford Humanities Review 3, no. 2 (1993): 1–14.Google Scholar
McClary, Susan. Feminine Endings. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.Google Scholar
McGraw, Judith. “Why Feminine Technologies Matter.” In Gender and Technology: A Reader, edited by Lerman, Nina E., Oldenziel, Ruth, and Mohun, Arwen P., 13–36. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Medovoi, Leerom. Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Messerschmidt, James W. “The Salience of Hegemonic Masculinity.” Men and Masculinities 22, no. 1 (2018): 85–91.10.1177/1097184X18805555CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peraino, Judith. “I'll Be Your Mixtape: Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, and the Queer Intimacies of Cassettes.” The Journal of Musicology 36, no. 4 (2019): 401–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perlman, Marc. “Consuming Audio: An Introduction to Tweak Theory.” In Music and Technoculture, edited by Lysloff, René, 346–57. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Perlman, Marc. “Golden Ears and Meter Readers: The Contest for Epistemic Authority in Audiophilia.” Social Studies of Science 34, no. 5 (2004): 783–807.10.1177/0306312704047613CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rodgers, Tara. “Tinkering with Cultural Memory: Gender and the Politics of Synthesizer Historiography.” Feminist Media Histories 1, no. 4 (2015): 5–30.10.1525/fmh.2015.1.4.5CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schroeder, Jonathan E. and Zwick, Detlev. “Mirrors of Masculinity: Representation and Identity in Advertising Images.” Consumption, Markets and Culture 7, no. 1 (2004): 21–52.10.1080/1025386042000212383CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sterne, Jonathan. “The Stereophonic Spaces of Soundscape.” In Living Stereo: Histories and Cultures of Multichannel Sound. Edited by Théberge, Paul, Devine, Kyle, and Everett, Tom, 67–83. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.Google Scholar
Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sounds Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Thompson, Emily. “Machines, Music, and the Quest for Fidelity: Marketing the Edison Phonograph in America, 1877–1925.” The Musical Quarterly 79, no. 1 (1995): 131–71.10.1093/mq/79.1.131CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vágnerová, Lucie. “‘Nimble Fingers’ in Electronic Music: Rethinking Sounds Through Neo-colonial Labour.” Organised Sound 22, no. 2 (2017): 250–58.10.1017/S1355771817000152CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Better Homes and GardensGoogle Scholar
HiFi & Music ReviewGoogle Scholar
HiFi ReviewGoogle Scholar
High FidelityGoogle Scholar
Vanity FairGoogle Scholar
Slattery, John dir. Mad Men. Season 5, episode 5, “Signal 30.” Written by Frank Pierson and Matthew Weiner. Aired April 15, 2012, on AMC.Google Scholar