Voices Beyond Order: Sound, Female Agency, and Non-Linear Rupture in Euripides' Medea, Tibetan Opera Drowa Sangmo, and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive

Voices Beyond Order: Sound, Female Agency, and Non-Linear Rupture in Euripides’ Medea, Tibetan Opera Drowa Sangmo, and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive

Abstract

This comparative study investigates how the archetype of the transgressive female outsider is deployed across three distinct cultures and media: Euripides’ Classical Greek tragedy Medea, the traditional Tibetan opera, or Lhamo, Drowa Sangmo, and David Lynch’s neo-noir film Mulholland Drive. Facing profound romantic and socio-political and institutional betrayals, the female protagonists dismantle societal facades through non-linear narrative ruptures, surreal transformations, and acoustic performance. This paper utilizes sound and acoustic dynamics, including encompassing non-verbal vocalizations, offstage wailing, operatic namthar, performance recordings, and cinematic acousmatic soundscapes, as a primary analytical lens. It argues that raw sound functions as an extra-textual archive of female trauma and agency. When formal speech fails these women, acoustic expression articulates unspeakable resistance, collapsing patriarchal social structures across civic, karmic, and subconscious spatial modalities.

I. Introduction

Contextual Framing

Across diverse cultural traditions, historical epochs, and media formats, patriarchal orders systematically enforce structural control by regulating the boundaries of legitimate speech. Within the classical Athenian polis, the feudal Tibetan kingdom, and 21st century Hollywood’s cinematic apparatus, institutional law and formal language function as mechanisms designed to contain female subjectivity and make transgressive trauma invisible. However, when formal language and patriarchal institutions suppress female voices, conventional linear narrative forms prove inadequate to represent the female experience. Instead, non-linear storytelling structures, surreal narrative ruptures, and raw acoustic performance emerge as primary ways of subversion. By breaking out of textual constraints, acoustic performance transforms sound into an extra-linguistic mode where female agency reasserts itself against systemic containment.

Methodological Overview: Literature and Performance Analysis

To analyze how acoustic disruption functions as an agent of structural resistance across disparate media, this study adopts film sound theory, voice semiotics, and performance-based classical drama analysis. Utilizing Creed’s concept of female monstrosity, Chion’s theoretical framework on the acousmâtre and acoustic rupture alongside Greene’s feminist critique of cinematic sound regimes, this project investigates how sound design regulates and fetishizes the female voice, and conversely, how sonic excess dismantles the narrative facade. This filmic methodology is further enriched by Barthes’s semiotic distinction between the linguistically coded pheno-song and the bodily, extra-linguistic geno-song ("grain of the voice"), providing the basis to evaluate non-verbal vocalizations as material manifestations of grief and power.

Crucially, this methodology extends beyond literal play scripts or readings by including real theatrical and audiovisual performance staging. In Euripides’ Medea, the analysis examines offstage non-verbal lamentations, guttural cries, and rhythmic choral chanting as dynamic acoustic elements that terrorize the onstage civic space before Medea physically enters, referring to National Theatre’s performance of Medea in 2014. In the traditional Tibetan Opera, or Lhamo, Drowa Sangmo, the study focuses on live operatic delivery, specifically the high-octave throat resonance of namthar chanting, which presents spiritual bioacoustics that sonically destabilize the narrative constructed though written language. In David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, the analysis interrogates multi-track sound design, ambient noise hums, and acousmatic sound illusions, where sound operates as a structural catalyst that shatters the protagonist's dream.

II. Female Transgression and the Failure of Social Order

Besides the similar use of voices, the three works have a common narrative structure. In each case, a woman becomes threatening because she occupies a position that the surrounding social order cannot comfortably accommodate. These similarities, however, should not be exaggerated. Medea is not simply the Greek equivalent of Drowa, and Diane is certainly not a modern version of either. Their differences are precisely what make the comparison productive.

Medea: The Foreign Woman Inside the Polis

Euripides' Medea follows the aftermath of Jason's decision to abandon Medea, his foreign wife, to marry the daughter of Creon, king of Corinth. After Creon orders Medea into exile, she prepares her revenge. She sends poisoned gifts to Jason's new bride and kills the children she shares with Jason before escaping Corinth in the chariot of Helios. The play therefore moves from a domestic conflict over marriage and abandonment toward a crisis that ultimately exceeds the authority of the household, the city, and conventional human justice. Medea's position is contradictory from the beginning. She is both inside and outside Corinth. Her marriage to Jason has apparently integrated her into a household, but her foreign origin prevents her from possessing the same civic status as the Greek men who control her fate. When Creon announces her exile, Medea identifies her condition directly: she has no homeland to which she can return and no institutional power with which to defend herself. Her famous statement that women are among the most “wretched” creatures because they must purchase a husband and then live under his authority turns what appears to be personal marital suffering into a broader critique of gendered social organization.

This is why Foley's analysis of tragic women is particularly useful. She observes that women in tragedies are “embedded in a social role that normally does not accommodate full autonomy” while simultaneously remaining marginal to its central institutions (Foley 117). Medea embodies precisely this contradiction. She is essential to Jason's household and lineage, yet she has no recognized political mechanism through which to respond when Jason abandons her for another marriage. She, recognized as an outsider, can be easily exiled from Corinth. The household depends upon her reproductive and domestic role while denying her authority over the conditions of that role.

The play makes this contradiction especially clear through the difference between Jason's explanation of his marriage and Medea's understanding of it. Jason presents his decision as rational political advancement: marrying the Corinthian princess will secure a better future for Medea and their children. Medea interpret this entirely different. She recognizes that Jason has treated their marriage as an instrument of political exchange. Her response is therefore not merely “jealous,” as a reductive reading might suggest. Instead, she is responding to the collapse of the social contract that gave meaning to her position as wife.

McClure's account of gender and speech helps clarify why Medea's verbal power matters so much. She pointed out that “to be a citizen was an act of speech” (McClure 8) and that public speech is associated with civic identity. She also noted that “although a socially sanctioned, women’s genre”, female voice “can also serve as a vehicle of social protest and resistance” in “opposition to male institutions” (McClure 46). It is “constructed as a source of danger and disorder liable to undermine the stable, masculine community of the polis (McClure 41). Therefore, we can see Medea's ability to enter the public space of argument itself as a form of transgression. Her speeches transform her from both an abandoned wife and an exiler into someone capable of interpreting and judging the political world around her publicly, subversing the oppressive social institutions.

Drowa Sangmo: Spiritual Female Agency

Drowa Sangmo establishes a different relationship between feminine power and social order. According to the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (TIPA), Drowa Sangmo is the manifestation of a celestial dakini who is born to poor parents in India and later becomes the second wife of a king. She gives birth to a son and daughter, but the king's first wife, Queen Hachang, a demoness, becomes jealous and attempts to destroy her children. Yet Drowa's position within this structure is fundamentally different from Medea's. Her identity as a dakini places her within a spiritual order that exists beyond the human kingdom, ensuring that the royal household can never completely contain or define her.

This becomes especially important in the opera's treatment of Drowa's motherhood. After leaving the human world, Drowa does not disappear but repeatedly manifests in different forms, including a medicinal snake, a hawk, and a fish, to protect her children from danger. Her physical separation from them hence does not eliminate her maternal agency. Instead, motherhood becomes a relationship that survives distance and bodily transformation. This is markedly different from Medea, where motherhood becomes increasingly entangled with Medea's conflict with Jason and ultimately with the familial destruction. Drowa's maternal power, by contrast, contributes to the survival of her children and the restoration of the royal lineage.

The contrast between Drowa Sangmo and Queen Hachang further complicates the opera's representation of powerful women. Both women possess supernatural identities, but their power operates according to different moral principles. Hachang uses her position within the royal household to pursure destructive ends driven by jeaulosy, while Drowa's supernatural agency is directed toward protecting her children despite her absence from the human world. The opera therefore distinguishes between forms of feminine agency according to their relationship with a larger moral and spiritual order.

The ending of Drowa Sangmo consequently produces a different resolution from Medea. Drowa does not destroy the family to escape its limitations. Her movement beyond the human world allows her identity to transcend the political and domestic structures that constrained her. Female agency is therefore not represented primarily as the overthrow of male authority, but as the ability to move beyond the boundaries of the social order without destroying the order itself.

Diane/Betty: The Female Subject Split by Fantasy

Mulholland Drive relocates the same structural problem from the household and kingdom into Hollywood. The first portion of the film presents Betty Elms as an apparently idealized version of feminine possibility. She arrives in Los Angeles, wants to become an actress, behaves with confidence, and appears capable of succeeding within the Hollywood system. She even saves a woman named Rita. Yet the later portion of the film reveals that Betty is a fantasy construction within Diane Selwyn’s consciousness, an actress who failed to establish herself in Hollywood and is emotionally devastated by her relationship with the actress Camilla Rhodes.

Diane's reality is radically different. Her acting career has failed to develop as she hoped, her relationship with Camilla has broken down, and Camilla is moving toward another relationship and greater professional success. Bradley argues that Diane's anxiety emerges from “systemic brokenness” that “points continually beyond her guilt for this crime or that, to the brokenness and illusory character of her personal history, her particular sociohistorical reality, and ultimately of the human condition itself,” as well as from frustrated desire and self-deception, rather than merely from an isolated personal crisis (183). This interpretation is important because it prevents the film from being reduced to a puzzle about which events are “real.” The central problem is not simply that Diane dreams. It is that the dream becomes the only narrative space in which she can construct the self she wanted to be.

The parallel with Medea is therefore structural rather than literal. Medea cannot become the socially recognized wife and citizen she expected to be, so she creates an alternative form of agency through revenge. Diane cannot become the successful actress and desired partner she imagined herself to be, so she creates Betty. Both women respond to exclusion by constructing an alternative form of life. Whereas Medea directs her agency outward against the world that betrayed her, Diane turns it inward, producing a psychological world that eventually collapses.

III. Sound as the Medium of Female Agency

If three works share a concern with women who exceed social structures by refusing to submit to diminished positions because of social structures, sound provides a particularly useful way of tracing how that excess becomes perceptible.

Barthes's concept of the “grain of the voice” is valuable here because it shifts attention away from the semantic content of speech toward the physical presence of vocal. He noted a distinction between “pheno-song” and bodily “geno-song”: the former concerns the socially recognizable structure of language that “forms the tissue of cultural values,” while the latter emphasizes the physical resonance of the voice, or “the diction of the language” (Barthes 182). This distinction allows the three works to be compared without pretending that Greek tragic speech, Tibetan opera, and film sound are identical. The key question is therefore not simply “what does the woman say?” but to discover what happens when the woman's voice becomes more than the socially acceptable meaning of her words.

Medea: From Lament to Rhetorical Control

One of the most striking features of Medea is that Medea’s presence begins sonically before visually. In the opening of Euripides’ play, Medea remains inside the house while the Nurse describes her suffering, and the audience hears her cries and lamentation before she physically appears. This heard-before-seen presence is also realized in later productions, such as Carrie Cracknell’s 2014 National Theatre production, in which the audience first hears the offstage cries of Medea (Helen McCrory) before seeing her. This staging matters because the house represents the private domestic space from which Medea is excluded from public authority, while the stage space outside is where her situation is publicly discussed. Her voice therefore crosses the boundary between private and public before her body does. When Medea finally appears, she declares, “Women of Corinth, I have come out of the house” (Euripides 214), explicitly marking this movement from domestic confinement into public speech.

This is where Chion's concept of acousmatic sound becomes unexpectedly applicable outside cinema. Chion defines acousmatic sound through the separation of sound from its visible source, all which “transmit sounds without showing their emitter” (71). While Greek tragedy obviously does not employ cinematic sound recording, Medea's offstage cries create an analogous dramatic effect: the audience hears a female body whose physical presence remains concealed. The outline for this project therefore describes Medea's lament as an acousmatic presence that enters the civic space before she physically appears that makes Medea simultaneously absent and present. Her first sound is not a political argument. It is grief.

Yet this grief does not remain irrational or uncontrolled. Once Medea enters the stage, her vocal strategy changes. She becomes extraordinarily articulate. She tells the Chorus about women's vulnerability: “Of all creatures that have life and reason, we women are the sorriest lot” (Euripides 229); explains her isolation: “I have no mother, no brother, no relative to offer me a safe haven from this disaster” (Euripides 256); and carefully constructs an image of herself as someone who has been wronged: “Now I do not begrudge you your good fortune. Give your daughter in marriage, prosper; but let me live in this land. I have been wronged, but I will keep quiet, defeated by my betters” (Euripides 311). Later, when she speaks to Jason, she manipulates language with increasing precision. Even when she appears to accept her exile, she reminds him, “I am abandoned and exiled from this country” (Euripides 603), keeping the injustice of his actions at the center of the conversation. Rather than simply expressing her anger, Medea uses speech to expose Jason’s contradictions and undermine his authority. Her manipulation becomes even more strategic when she presents the poisoned gifts to the new bride as an act of reconciliation. When Jason questions her generosity, she immediately disguises her intention through another calculated performance: “gifts persuade the gods” and “gold is stronger than ten thousand words among men” (Euripides 963). Medea's speech has two layers. On the surface, she performs the expected emotional role of the abandoned woman; beneath that surface, she is calculating her revenge. Boscà Cuquerella concludes that Medea “conceals herself and her emotions through a linguistic mask and various forms of language and actions” (192), allowing the audience to recognize her true intentions while the male characters accept her performance at face value.

By the end of the play, however, this concealment turns into open contempt. After the murder of her children, she rejects Jason’s attempt to claim innocence, telling him that their deaths resulted from “your abuse and your new marriage” (Euripides 1364), and finally condemns him as an “oath-breaker and deceiver of guests.” Her voice has therefore moved from lamentation to argument, and finally to a position of complete rhetorical control over Jason. Hence, Medea possesses a range of sonic and rhetorical modes. Her agency develops through her ability to move between these modes. The important point is that Medea does not gain power by abandoning language, but by mastering the language that the patriarchal world recognizes as legitimate. Her vocal agency thus develops in stages, from lament to persuasion, manipulation, threat, and finally judgment. The progression parallels her transformation from socially excluded woman into an almost supernatural agent.

The final appearance of Medea in the chariot of Helios completes this movement from human speech to supernatural authority. Her actions cannot be contained by the legal institutions represented by Creon or Jason. She does not receive conventional civic punishment or reconciliation. Instead, she exits the human political space altogether. Her final sonic and dramatic authority therefore belongs to a space beyond ordinary civic justice.

Drowa Sangmo: Operatic Voice and Spiritual Transformation

The role of sound in Drowa Sangmo must be understood within the broader performance tradition of Tibetan opera. Unlike Medea, which reaches its audience primarily through dramatic dialogue and spoken verse, Drowa Sangmo belongs to Lhamo, a performance tradition combining narrative, dance, music, and operatic vocalization.

Fitzgerald describes Tibetan opera as a “form of Tibetan traditional performance that includes elements of dance, operatic vocalizations, and epic scripts” (270). It communicates through namthar, a vocal style associated with religious biographies and stories of liberation. Sound therefore does not simply accompany the narrative of Drowa's transformation but also provides a primary mean through which that transformation becomes perceptible to audience.

The oral transmission of Lhamo is particularly significant. Fitzgerald explains that performers traditionally learn songs through cyclical oral practice: a trained teacher “jots down the line of songs and sings it out for the students. This is repeated until the students can satisfactorily repeat the line of song” (275). The preservation of the narrative therefore depends upon the human voice and the body of the performer rather than solely upon a fixed written text. This creates an interesting parallel with Drowa's own changing physical identity. Just as she can move between various forms without losing her identity, her story can move between generations of performers without losing its spiritual significance. Her identity is therefore preserved through repetition and transformation rather than through a single, fixed physical form.

This performative quality also changes how Drowa's supernatural agency is represented. When she appears in different forms to protect her children, the narrative still imagines her identity as something that can persist through transformation. On stage, this principle is reinforced by the performer's ability to embody a character through voice, gesture, costume, and movement. The audience simultaneously sees a human performer and recognizes the supernatural character being represented. Sound importantly participates in this process by allowing the character's identity to remain continuous even as the visual and physical dimensions of the performance change.

This is where Drowa Sangmo's soundscape differs most clearly from Medea's. In Medea, the female voice becomes threatening because it moves from private suffering toward public confrontation. Medea's cries emerge from the household, while her later speeches allow her to enter the public sphere and challenge the men who control her fate. In Drowa Sangmo, by contrast, female vocal performance is already embedded within a communal and religious tradition. Her voice does not need to break out of the performance structure to acquire authority. Instead, its authoritative power comes from participating in a cultural form through which spiritual narratives have been repeatedly transmitted.

The relationship between voice and transformation therefore becomes central to Drowa's representation. Her supernatural identity is not presented as a fixed possession but as a capacity to move between worlds and forms. The performative nature of Tibetan opera gives this idea a sonic equivalent: the character exists through a voice that is repeatedly embodied by different performers. Sound consequently becomes a medium through which Drowa's identity can transcend the limitations of a single body, just as her character transcends the limitations of the human royal household.

Mulholland Drive: When the Voice Separates from the Body

If Medea moves from private lament toward public and supernatural agency, and Drowa Sangmo embeds feminine suffering within a ritual and spiritual performance tradition, Mulholland Drive takes the opposite route. Lynch gradually dismantles the relationship between voice, body, image, and identity.

This is most obvious in Club Silencio. Before entering the club, Rita repeats “silencio” and “no hay banda” in her sleep. At the club, the magician announces that there is no band and that what the audience within the film hears is a recording. He then demonstrates this principle by producing sounds whose apparent sources do not correspond with what the audience watching the film hears. Mactaggart describes the sequence as a deliberate separation between sound and visible source, culminating in Rebekah Del Rio's performance of “Llorando.” The scene is therefore not simply a musical interlude. It is the theory of the entire film. The audience has assumed that images correspond to reality, just as we normally assume that a singing body produces the voice we hear. Lynch suddenly removes that assumption. When Del Rio collapses onstage and the body becomes silent, her recorded voice continues.

This is one of the most important moments for the present argument because it destabilizes the relationship between feminine identity and bodily presence. The voice is no longer guaranteed by the body. It becomes something that can survive the body, contradict the body, and even expose the artificiality of the scene.

Jiang et al. similarly argue that Lynch's sound design makes “the human voice of the characters in the film distorted, so that their identities become blurred and misplaced.” (4) It makes it difficult for the audience to “capture the real and stable identity of the speaker” (Jiang et al. 7). Mactaggart goes further by interpreting the Club Silencio scene not only as a plot that “physically and metaphorically demonstrates the falling apart of Betty’s fantasy” (Mactaggart 6), but also a central example of how Lynch uses sound to construct the film's unstable reality. The article notes that Del Rio's collapse leaves the sound of the voice “hanging in the air”, producing a rupture between visible performance and audible experience.

That rupture is directly connected to Diane. Betty is the the woman Diane wants to be. She is talented, confident, and seemingly capable of succeeding in Hollywood. In contrast, Diane is the woman who exists behind the fantasy. The sound of “Llorando” exposes the exact contradiction that the film's narrative eventually reveals: the fantasy can continue to produce emotional truth even after its material basis has collapsed. This makes the scene more complicated than simply saying “everything is a dream.” The fictional narrative does not make Diane’s emotions unreal. Her grief is real within the psychological structure of the film.

Sound therefore functions as a bridge between fantasy and trauma. The voice is artificial, but the emotion is not. This distinction allows Mulholland Drive to offer a radically modern version of the problem represented by Medea. Medea's voice cannot be absorbed into the social order, so it eventually exceeds that order. Diane's voice cannot be securely located within a stable identity at all. Her fantasy creates Betty's voice, body, career, and relationships, but the Club Silencio sequence reveals that all of these elements are constructed. In this sense, Lynch moves the conflict inside the female subject.

IV. Three Forms of Non-Linear Rupture

The importance of sound becomes even clearer when considered alongside the narrative structure. All three works eventually abandon straightforward linear realism, but they do so for different reasons.

Medea: External rupture

The ending of Medea introduces a supernatural rupture into a political and domestic tragedy. Medea escapes in the chariot of Helios, making ordinary civic justice impossible. The supernatural ending is therefore not an escape from the argument of the play. It is the culmination of the argument. The human institutions of Corinth have failed to contain Medea. The ending makes that failure visible.

Drowa Sangmo: Spiritual transformation

In Drowa Sangmo, Drowa's departure to the dakini realm and her later manifestations disrupt linear human causality. The narrative repeatedly moves between the human and supernatural realms. The mother is physically absent but remains causally present. The story's non-linearity therefore reflects a worldview in which physical death, separation, and suffering do not necessarily terminate agency.

Mulholland Drive: Psychological rupture

Lynch's blue box produces the most radical form of narrative fracture. The viewer gradually recognizes that the first part of the film cannot be understood according to the same rules as the second. Betty becomes Diane; Rita becomes associated with Camilla; apparently unrelated characters become distorted versions of people from Diane's life. Bradley argues that Lynch’s manipulation of “different temporal frames” disrupts the “ordinary future-oriented and linear progression of a narrative” (Bradley 181), reflecting the way Diane’s past and imagined future continually shape her self-understanding. This means that narrative rupture itself is a form of representation.

The three works can therefore be placed on a spectrum:

Sound follows the same movement. Medea's voice invades public space; Drowa's operatic performance participates in spiritual order; Lynch's sound destroys the stability of the cinematic image itself.

V. Comparative Synthesis: Voice as Threat, Transformation, and Illusion

Medea: Voice as Threat

Medea's voice becomes dangerous because it crosses boundaries. She speaks publicly. She argues with men. She manipulates political authorities. She turns private betrayal into public accusation. Most importantly, her voice begins before her body appears. The woman whom Corinth attempts to exile is already acoustically present within the civic space. Her cries therefore function as an early warning of the political crisis to come.

Foley's argument that tragedy frequently uses women to expose tensions between domestic and political values is especially relevant here. Medea makes the private political because her marriage is itself embedded in political structures. Her ultimate agency is destructive because she has no legitimate institutional path through which to transform her situation.

Drowa Sangmo: Voice as Transformation

Drowa Sangmo provides a different model. The story does not suggest that the solution to female suffering is simply greater individual power. Instead, Drowa's supernatural identity allows her to move between realms, while the narrative eventually restores both family and political order.

The opera's vocal tradition reinforces this worldview. Lhamo is fundamentally an oral performance tradition, transmitted through embodied vocal practice. Fitzgerald's fieldwork shows that songs are learned through repeated singing and listening, making vocal performance a form of cultural continuity. The voice here is therefore not primarily the isolated expression of an individual. It is an inherited, communal, and ritualized connection between the present performer and an older narrative. That makes Drowa's female agency fundamentally different from Medea's. Drowa's power does not ultimately require the destruction of the moral universe. Instead, it participates in a process of transformation that restores the world after disorder.

Diane: Voice as Illusion

Diane represents the most pessimistic model as she cannot escape the system physically nor transform it spiritually. Instead, she creates another reality in which she can temporarily become the woman she wishes to be.

However, the soundscape eventually exposes the illusion. Club Silencio's fundamental statement “no hay banda” destroys the assumption that visible performance and audible reality necessarily correspond. The sequence therefore functions simultaneously as a comment on cinema and as a comment on Diane's identity. Mactaggart identifies the separation of Del Rio's voice from her collapsing body as a central example of this sonic contradiction.

Diane's fantasy works in the same way. Betty appears real. Her voice appears real. Her success appears real. Her relationship with Rita appears real. However, the film gradually reveals that these elements are constructions. The female voice therefore becomes the place where identity breaks apart.

VI. Rethinking the “Monstrous Feminine”

These differences suggest that Creed’s concept of the “monstrous feminine” should be used carefully. Creed's framework is useful because it directs attention to the cultural anxiety generated by women who cross boundaries. But applying the concept identically to all three works would flatten the differences between them. Medea is “monstrous” because she exceeds the role of wife and mother. Hachang is monstrous within the narrative because she is explicitly associated with demonic power and destructive jealousy. Diane is never literally a monster. Her “monstrosity” is psychological and social. She becomes monstrous only when the fantasy of the ideal Hollywood woman collapses into jealousy, resentment, and self-destruction.

Thus, three works gradually transform the meaning of the dangerous woman in such a way: Medea is the woman who cannot be contained by the state, Hachang is the woman whose desire for power is absorbed into a cosmological opposition between good and evil, and Diane is the woman who cannot maintain a coherent self within a system that promises female success while making that success structurally unstable.

The comparison therefore should not conclude that all three works are discussing the same issue about patriarchy, as they are not. Instead, their structural similarity allows us to see how different cultures answer the same fundamental problem differently: What happens when a woman's experience cannot be accommodated by the social order available to her?

VII. Conclusion

Euripides' Medea, the Tibetan opera Drowa Sangmo, and Lynch's Mulholland Drive do not belong to a single culture, nor should their female protagonists be reduced to interchangeable versions of the “rebellious woman”. Their values as comparative objects lie precisely in the differences between the constructed worlds they construct. Medea exists at the intersection of gender, marriage, and civic exclusion. Drowa Sangmo exists within a religious narrative in which human suffering is connected to supernatural identity and moral restoration. Diane exists within a modern world in which Hollywood itself becomes a machine for producing and destroying feminine fantasies.

Sound provides a way to place these radically different works into dialogue without erasing their differences. In Medea, offstage cries make female suffering audible before the woman herself enters the public stage; her subsequent rhetorical control demonstrates how speech can be weaponized within a society that restricts female public agency. In Drowa Sangmo, operatic voice belongs to a religious oral performance tradition and thus not simply expresses individual suffering but participates in cultural continuity and spiritual transformation. In Mulholland Drive, sound breaks the connection between voice and body. The “Llorando” performance at Club Silencio reveals that the voice can continue after the body collapses, just as Diane's fantasy can continue even when the reality supporting it has already failed.

The three forms of sound consequently correspond to three forms of female agency. Medea's voice becomes a threat to civic order; Drowa Sangmo's performance becomes a source for spiritual transformation; Diane's fragmented soundscape becomes an expression of psychological rupture. Their narratives likewise move through three different forms of non-linearity: supernatural escape, spiritual transformation, and dream logic. In each case, ordinary linear structures prove insufficient to contain the woman's experience. Yet the consequences differ dramatically. Medea's rupture remains ethically unresolved; Drowa Sangmo restores a damaged moral and familial order; and Mulholland Drive offers no comparable restoration, leaving Diane trapped within the collapse of the identity she constructed.

The most significant parallel, therefore, is not that these three works portray “strong women” or even that they all challenge patriarchy. Rather, they repeatedly locate female agency at the boundary between what can be socially spoken and what must be expressed through another form. When formal political language fails Medea, lament and eventually supernatural action take over. When the human world cannot contain Drowa Sangmo, operatic and spiritual performance connect the human and supernatural realms. When Diane can no longer reconcile her actual life with her desired identity, Lynch makes the instability audible through voices detached from bodies, recordings mistaken for live performance, and sound that refuses to remain synchronized with the image.

Sound is therefore not merely an aesthetic decoration added to these narratives. It is a way of representing the limits of representation itself. The female voice becomes most powerful precisely when it exceeds the social, visual, or linguistic structure that attempts to contain it. Across Greek tragedy, Tibetan opera, and modern cinema, the “dangerous woman” is consequently not simply a figure of destruction. She is a figure through voice whom each culture tests the boundaries of its own systems of justice, identity, and order.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. “The Grain of the Voice.” Image-Music-Text, translated by Stephen Heath, Hill and Wang, 1977, pp. 179–189.

Boscà Cuquerella, Alba. “Between Truth and Appearance: Medea’s Emotional Manipulation through Gnomai.” Cuadernos de Filología Clásica: Estudios Griegos e Indoeuropeos, vol. 35, 2025, pp. 101–118. Your annotated bibliography identifies this article as particularly useful for understanding Medea's strategic rhetorical performance.

Bradley, Daniel. “Brokenness and Hope: David Lynch’s Contribution to a Phenomenology of Anxiety in Mulholland Drive.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 29, no. 2, 2015, pp. 180–193.

Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman, Columbia UP, 1994. Chion's framework of acousmatic sound, added value, and vococentrism is identified in your research outline as a central theoretical tool.

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1993. Your bibliography uses Creed to conceptualize the cultural construction of transgressive women as monstrous or threatening.

Fitzgerald, Kati. “Tibetan Opera in and outside the Tibet Autonomous Region.” Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 31, no. 1, 2014, pp. 270–278. Note: the bibliographic information in your previous annotated bibliography says vol. 33 (2016), pp. 115–139, but the actual uploaded article identifies itself as Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 31, no. 1 (Spring 2014).

Foley, Helene P. Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton UP, 2001. Foley's discussion of female speech, agency, domesticity, and civic authority provides the principal gender framework for the Medea section.

Greene, Liz. “Speaking, Singing, Screaming: Controlling the Female Voice in American Cinema.” The Soundtrack, vol. 2, no. 1, 2008, pp. 13–25. Your annotated bibliography identifies Greene as especially useful for analyzing the relationship between gender, vocal performance, and cinematic control.

Jiang, Xingyao, Rosdeen Suboh, and Farideh Alizadeh. “An Aesthetic Exploration of Sound Illusion in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.” Malaysian Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, vol. 9, no. 4, 2024, pp. 1–13.

McClure, Laura. Spoken Like a Woman: Speech and Gender in Athenian Drama. Princeton UP, 1999. McClure's discussion of the relationship between female speech and civic identity is particularly important to the analysis of Medea's rhetorical agency.

Mactaggart, Allister. “‘Silencio’: Hearing Loss in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, vol. 6, 2014. The article's analysis of the Club Silencio sequence is especially useful for understanding the separation between Del Rio's voice and visible body.

Drowa Sangmo. Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts. The TIPA account provides the basic narrative sequence of Drowa Sangmo, Hachang, the royal children, Drowa's supernatural manifestations, and the eventual restoration of the kingdom.

Mulholland Drive. Directed by David Lynch, performances by Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, and Justin Theroux, Universal Pictures, 2001.