Clara Latham's research and creative practice focus on the relationship between sound, technology, sexuality, and the body. She has published articles in Sound Studies, Women & Music, Contemporary Modern European History, the Opera Quarterly, and in the edited volume Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience. Her opera-drama about the birth of psychoanalysis, Bertha the Mom, was supported by the American Composers Forum and premiered at Roulette Intermedium in 2018. She fronts the psychedelic prog rock bands Starring and New Pope, and is currently working on a monograph about gender and sound reproduction in electronic music, titled The RCA Theremin: Gendered Labor and the Electronic Musical Imaginary.

Shortly after the arrival of Russian inventor Leon Theremin in the United States in 1928, plans to develop the Theremin as a mass-produced musical instrument for the home quickly took shape, aligning it with other commercialized domestic appliances. But the nature of the labor that marketers of the Theremin promised was different from the vacuum cleaner or electric lightbulb: it promised to perform musical work. The RCA Theremin: Gendered Labor and the Electronic Musical Imaginary analyzes the reception history of the Theremin through the lens of domestic music-making and gendered labor in the twentieth century. In it, Clara argues that electronic music represents anxieties about gender that play out in discourses of copies and originals. These discourses promote the view that electronic instruments eliminate the economic value of musical labor, which is aligned with a gendered power difference. The first commercially marketed electronic musical instrument, the Theremin set the stage for assumptions and beliefs that resonated throughout electronic music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As a GIDEST Fellow, Clara will complete the third chapter of the book, titled “From the Home to the Factory: Female RCA Laborers in the 1930s.” Based on ethnographic research of female factory workers as well as journalistic accounts, this chapter considers the relationship between the marketing of the Theremin and other domestic audio technologies and RCA’s employment of women in its factories.