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Katie MacMillan

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It's A Scream: Professional Hearing and Tape Fetishism

This paper addresses the roles of taping and tapes in the arenas of academic Conversation and Discourse Analysis, and in a recent American trial of therapists which constituted a major development in the Recovered Memory/False Memory debate. Our argument is that two seemingly opposed features of the practice of hearing tapes. Tape fetishism and professional hearing are in fact interdependent. By tape fetishism we mean the treatment of the tape as a direct and evidential record of a past event, and thus as a quasi-magical time machine. Professional hearing is a trained method of hearing as developed, for example, in conversation analysis. The joint operation of these features prevents us from seeing that all hearings are mediated, and that their reports are interpretative. The paper sets out to analyze modes of mediation: the analytic glossing of voiced but non-linguistic sounds (laughing, crying, screaming) and the use of rhetorical descriptions in media reports of taped sounds.


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