By Tanja Diers

Abstract

This audio paper examines how sonic solidarity is formed within a separatist community of women who have undergone fertility treatment, as explored through the project Listening Choir (2024–2025). Through monthly gatherings, participants come together to share experiences of hope, disappointment, shame, desperation, anger, and grief. The choir’s listening practice is grounded in feminist thought (Sara Ahmed, Donna Haraway, Silvia Federici) and the principles of Deep Listening. Within this framework, the women come to experience their voices as autobiographical instruments (Carson 2025, 21), while exploring how vocal practice enables them to stretch, transform, and reimagine themselves (LaBelle 2014, 5).

The sound material analyzed in this paper was recorded during the Listening Choir sessions and consists of vocal exercises in which the women express mutual support by sounding together and joining free tones. An additional recording is an experimental, rhythmically structured composition based on the many medications taken during fertility treatment. The resulting cacophony, interwoven with moments of tonal harmony, forms a sonic image of the solidarity that characterizes the soundings of the Listening Choir.

The Listening Choir function as a separatist group (Gaonkar & Schmidt 2024) inspired by consciousness raising groups from the 1970s, seeking a shared practice capable of offering relief and healing. A further aim has been to reclaim – through the body, voicing, and listening – the potential and power of bodies subjected to intense hormonal and interventional treatments, particularly in the abdominal region. As Silvia Federici writes, “Our bodies have reasons that we need to learn, rediscover, reinvent. We need to listen to their language as the path to our health and healing …” (2020, 123).

Audio paper

Recordings, research and speak: Tanja Diers 

Mix and editing: Mads Brauer