gender and language

[Henry Rogers]

With respect to Suzanne's comments on the difficulty of self-identification as
gay/straight.

We (Ron Smyth, Greg Jacobs, and I) have been looking at the phonetic features
associated with gay-sounding male voices. We recorded men's voices and then had
listeners judge them as gay- or straight sounding. We used these judgements
rather the actual/self-identified sexual orientation of the speaker. It is very
obvious that some gay men do not sound gay, and that the occasional straight
man sounds gay. Our speaker judged straightest sounding was in fact gay, and
our sixth gayest sounding man was in fact straight. Talking about gay- and
straight-souding has meant that we did not have to worry about finding a random
sample of gay and straight men.

I also echo the concern that has been raised (Erez et al.) that the binary
split of male-female typically used for gender is insufficiently nuanced to
capture the reality of speech variation. I suspect that at least some of the
phonetic characteristics of gay-sounding male speech are borrowed from straight
female speech patterns and act to create a distance from straight-sounding men,
using some sort of covert prestige.

Unfortunately, we don't have any data on lesbian speech, but there seems to be
an interesting asymmetry in that listeners seem to be more ready to
characterise a man's voice as gay-sounding than to say that a woman's voice
sounds lesbian.

In a lighter vein, but clearly underlining the stereotype: I caught a line last
night from Will and Grace where Will describes Jack--'Everytime he opens his
mouth, a purse falls out'.

Best,

Hank Rogers


Suzanne Evans wrote:

> With regard to sexuality as a possible variable:
>
> >  Much of the work that has
> > been done on feminine vs. masculine speech has equated masculinity with
> > men, and generalized the use of non-standard features as a solidarity
> > building, covert prestige item for men. This does not necessarily hold up
> > for gay (queer) men and women.
>
> I agree. A consideration of gay men and women certainly complicates the
> picture. There is a definite lack of linguistic research in this area (see,
> for a good summary:  Jacobs, Greg. 1996. Lesbian and Gay Male Language Use:
> A Critical Review of the Literature. American Speech 71:49-71.)
>
> However, much depends on how one defines the subjects of one's study as
> gay(queer). We have to rely on speakers' self-identifications, yet as Zwicky
> points out in "Queerly Phrased", these are not always reliable. This is due,
> in part, to the continuum of sexual self-identification that encompasses not
> only gay/straight, but bisexual and many other shades of sexuality.
> Reliability is also influenced by differing applications of terminology
> (this seems, he suggests, to be a particular problem with the catch-all
> "bisexual").
>
> Suzanne
>
> ______________________
>
> Department of Linguistics
> University of Pennsylvania
>
> e-mail: suzanne at babel.ling.upenn.edu

--

Henry Rogers                                rogers at chass.utoronto.ca
6072 Robarts Library                    http://chass.utoronto.ca/~rogers/
Department of Linguistics           vox:  (416-) 978-1769
University of Toronto                  fax:    (416-) 971-2688
Toronto, Ontario,