Bisexuality and /s/ production

Chloe Willis

doi:10.3765/plsa.v6i1.4942

Abstract

The belief that there are systematic differences in speech production as a function of sexual orientation has inspired a vast body of linguistic research investigating the acoustic correlates of sounding queer. Although gay-sounding voices and to a lesser extent lesbian-sounding voices are well represented in this literature, bisexuality is conspicuously absent. The current study addresses this gap through an acoustic analysis of bisexual English speakers’ read speech vis-à-vis lesbian, gay, and straight speakers, specifically attending to three measures of the voiceless alveolar fricative /s/: center of gravity, skew, and duration. A qualitative analysis of post-test participant information surveys contextualizes the statistical results. The study finds that bisexual women and men do not pattern consistently with lesbian, gay, or straight speakers, or even with each other. The results call into question the common methodological practice of grouping bisexual speakers with lesbian and gay speakers a priori and underscore the importance of intersectionality, gender normativity, and ideology in sociophonetic studies of sexuality and the voice.

Highlights

Gaudio’s (1994) influential work on the pitch properties of gay and straight men’s speech inspired numerous similar sociophonetic studies investigating the acoustic correlates of sounding queer
How bisexual speakers orient to gender and sexuality vis-à-vis other axes of identity such as race is outside the scope of this paper, but the findings reported here provide empirical justification for the insights of intersectionality
The statistical results suggest that more work on duration is needed

Summary

Introduction

Gaudio’s (1994) influential work on the pitch properties of gay and straight men’s speech inspired numerous similar sociophonetic studies investigating the acoustic correlates of sounding queer. Many of these studies focus exclusively on gay men or sounding gay (e.g., Smyth, Jacobs & Rogers 2003, Campbell-Kibler 2011), whereas relatively few studies focus on sounding lesbian (e.g., Van Borsel et al 2013, Barron-Lutzross 2015). Some studies on queer-sounding voices include a small number of bisexual participants (e.g., Pierrehumbert et al 2004, Munson et al 2006a, 2006b) In such cases, bisexual speakers are usually categorized with lesbian and gay speakers. All of this to say that, while much is known about sexuality and the voice, we cannot conclude that sexuality has acoustic correlates that go beyond ideologies of lesbian or gay and straight difference at this point

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion