Queer Sonorities: Sound as Persuasion in Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons

This essay considers the feminist implications of Gertrude Stein's sonic devices in the extended prose poem Tender Buttons, a study in persuasive sound that avoids the foreclosures of semantics and grammar through the ephemerality of sound. Situating domestic space and its conversational tones as the sonic context in which Stein produced her work, I explore how she offers collaborative, embodied, and playful communicative strategies that encourage the reader to hear and speak the sounds of her domestic experiences. In Stein's prose, vocal readers exceed the impositions of written text through performance and linguistic sonorities enabling the sounds of words (as opposed to their meanings) to slip away from static positions. Readers are encouraged to participate in the process of making meaning, to both sound out and listen to the words on the printed page. Stein's sound writing, in other words, resonates with feminist communication theories that foreground listening, collaboration, experiential knowledge, and forms of collective agency.