Hegemonic masculinity and the variability of gay-sounding speech

Abstract

Sociophonetic inquiry into sexuality and the voice has often focused on the perception of men’s sexuality on the basis of disembodied voices. However, inconsistencies across these studies limit our ability to unite their findings into a cohesive model of gay-sounding speech. This paper focuses on variability among gay-sounding speakers by analyzing the voices of female-to-male transgender individuals, or trans men. Trans men who make use of testosterone typically experience a significant drop in vocal pitch, yet may maintain stylistic traits acquired while living in a female social role. An acoustic and perceptual analysis of trans and non-trans men’s voices reveals that even as trans men may be perceived as gay-sounding, their sociolinguistic styles also differ from those of gay-sounding non-trans men. These findings support the notion that gay-sounding speech does not constitute a single phonetic style, but rather numerous deviations from the hegemonic norm.

Categories, stereotypes, and the linguistic perception of sexuality

“…Campbell-Kibler 2011; Drager 2011); • Sibilance (SEXUALITY)-research has also shown that spectral properties of the voiceless sibilant /s/, including elevated levels of Centre of Gravity (CoG) and a more negative spectral skew, are positively correlated with listener perceptions of gayness in men (e.g. Munson et al 2006;Campbell-Kibler 2011;Zimman 2013;Pharao et al 2014); • TH-fronting (SOCIAL CLASS)-work on social dialect variation in Britain has argued that labio-dental realisations of the voiceless inter-dental fricative (i.e. To test these features, I recorded three White British men from the southeast of England reading a short stimulus passage (see Appendix A).…”

The development of sex/gender-specific /s/ and its relationship to gender identity in children and adolescents

“…Or alternatively, the asymmetry of within-sex correlations between speech acoustics and gender-typicality for the two gender groups could suggest that adolescent boys attach more social meaning to /s/ than do girls. It is also possible that, because phonetic variation in /s/ production is linked to adult sexual orientation in men but not women, /s/ production is predominantly a marker of gender expression for only boys (Mack & Munson, 2012;Zimman, 2013). In addition, the misarticulation of /s/ to [θ] is frequently noted in prepubertal boys with Gender Dysphoria (Munson et al, 2015).…”

Variability in /s/ among transgender speakers: Evidence for a socially grounded account of gender and sibilants

“…Undoubtedly, transgender speakers provide a perfect opportunity for teasing apart social and biological influences on the gendered voice; however, there are clear applications of this model of gender that can enrich our understanding of cisgender voices as well. For example, Zimman (2013) discusses the importance of considering gender presentation, and not just sexual orientation, in sociophonetic theorizations of perceived sexuality among men. Gender expression is a concept that can help us understand the everyday production of gender through both linguistic and extra-linguistic means.…”

“…Given that working-class and middle-class adolescent girls are more similar to one another physiologically than to adult men, one must turn to articulatory practices to explain these findings. On the other side of the Atlantic, several studies have identified /s/ as one of the most consistent and most salient cues for the perception of sexual orientation among North American English-speaking men (Campbell-Kibler 2011;Levon 2007;Munson 2007;Munson et al 2006;Zimman 2013; inter alia), which demonstrates that adult men are capable of producing /s/ with a range of frequency profiles. This usually comes in the form of a more negative skew, i.e.…”