Re-vocalising the Screen Siren: From Homer to Hollywood

This thesis revisits the voices of the sirens in Grecian mythology, who I argue have had their vocal power stripped away in dominant cultural representations. Homer’s sirens were monstrous half-bird creatures with powerful, beautiful voices, but have come to be represented as visually-alluring mermaids. In counter to the siren’s historical de-vocalisation, I develop a “vocalised siren” framework to investigate actress vocal performance in a selection of films and interviews about actresses. I reconfigure the trope of the Hollywood “screen siren” star actress to analyse powerful, disruptive vocal performances, overall contributing to nuanced analysis of vocality in feminist film studies.