Language and Transgender

For the past forty years or so, sociolinguistics has explored many aspects related to how gender and language interact. Within speech community based sociolinguistics, issues of gender emerged as the study of sex differences in which the focus of analysis was the quantifiable differences between women's and men's use of particular linguistic variables. There was a tendency to represent masculinity and femininity as a gender "binary" with specific emphasis on the deficit model of analysis that portrays women in negative ways and men in positive ways. However and contrary to the traditional binary view of masculinity and femininity, the central theme running through this dissertation is that language use with all its components is one important means by which gender -an ongoing social process -is enacted or constructed; gender is something individuals do, in part, through linguistic choices as opposed to something individuals are or have as advocated in the speech community based sociolinguistics. A biological sex and a social or a socialised gender within a given speech community is inadequate if agency and diversity are to be properly acknowledged and if crucially language is seen as shaping or more constructing gender, not simply as a characteristic of it. It then becomes evident that variations namely, within a single gender and within a single speaker need to be investigated not in terms of fixedness but as a practice in a specific context which, amounts to looking at situated or local meanings, i.e. those meanings assigned by participants within a given context to a given set of contextual features. This is convincingly shown in the Community of Practice framework, according to which identities and discourses develop in a community of practice. The latter is used here to analyse the voice qualities to convey linguistic practices associated with an identity of women and men in Mostaganem (so far unexamined) and to illustrate the manner in which members of two local communities females and males negotiate gender through linguistic practice. It details a current research into females and males teachers and trainee teachers as two separate communities of practice focussing on locally defined identities as constructed through interactions.

В русском языке традиционно присутствовали термины для обозначения людей, не вписывающихся в бинарные гендерные роли, однако в настоящее время они считаются устаревшими и уничижительными, в связи с чем русскоговорящие трансгендерные люди используют для самообозначения термины и их производные, заимствованные из английского и немецкого языков: «транссексуал», «трансгендер», «кроссдрессер», «трансвестит» и другие. В активистских кругах также получили распространение нестандартные формы словообразования, такие как «транс*» и нижнее подчёркивание (например, «активист_ки»). Новые термины и формы встречают неоднозначную реакцию населения, в том числе самих трансгендерных людей, а также становятся объектами попыток государственного регулирования. Целью настоящего исследования является установление закономерностей употребления различных терминов, описывающих трансгендерность и гендерную небинарность, на примере веб-ресурсов, посвящённых трансгендерности. Скачано четыре веб-форума и одна e-mail рассылка, годы покрытия с 1998 по 2021. Показана низкая частота встречаемости исконно русских терминов «двуполый», «мужлан/ка», «бабеня», «девуля». Говоря о заимствованных, наблюдался резкий рост употребления термина «трансгендер», временный рост и падение «транссексуал», постепенное падение «МтФ/ФтМ» (от англоязычных maleto-female и female-to-male). С помощью корпусного дискурс-анализа установлено, что пропорция «трансгендер/транссексуал» росла в тематических категориях «о себе», «о других конкретных», «цитирование» и «иное», но осталась практически неизменной при обсуждении медицинских вопросов, что говорит о наличии медицинских коннотациях у термина «транссексуал». Нетипичные для русского языка формы «транс» (в качестве прилагательного), «транс*» и нижнее подчёркивание были характерны для речи активистов, но почти не проявлялись в личном общении. Найден всего один пример употребления множественного числа в отношении себя (адаптация англоязычного singular they). Таким образом, показана избирательность заимствования: наиболее популярны были те иностранные термины/формы, которые соответствовали структуре русского языка, тогда как остальные характеризовали речь небольшого числа активистов.

Despite the significance of intersex constituencies for explaining the social nature of sex and gender, intersex linguistic and social practices remain a yet unexplored frontier within sociolinguistics. This article examines fundamental frequency (F0) and vowel formant (F1-F3) production by participants with Turner Syndrome (TS), one of the most common intersex chromosomal conditions, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This analysis demonstrates significant differences in fundamental frequency and F3 among different participant groups. I argue that height, growth hormone, and chromosomes are fundamental in constructing womanhood for TS women. Along with relevant ethnographic data, these results call for a re-examination of the body within linguistic and anthropological understandings of 'womanhood' and 'femaleness'. This article highlights the ways these biological factors intersect with gendered perceptions of age and maturity, which can have real-world effects on linguistic practice and the social life of intersex individuals. (Brazilian Portuguese, fundamental frequency, gender, intersex, Turner Syndrome, vowel formants, critical intersex studies)* I N T R O D U C T I O N Much foundational work in sociophonetics has focused on the place of the 'female' and 'male' voice as it relates to the interplay between the biological and the social. Although the physical body and human sexual dimorphism have been cited as the underlying explanation for gendered linguistic practices, much scholarship, including observations of pitch differences and gendered speech across multiple language families, has demonstrated that purely biological explanations cannot account for the full range of gendered linguistic behavior (Sachs 1975; Simpson 2009; Zimman 2017). Recent research in embodied sociolinguistics and queer linguistics on gender non-normativity in the voice has challenged some of these assumptions about the source of such differences (Calder 2020; Zimman 2020). This coincides with a movement in sociocultural linguistics that has begun to examine the role of the body beyond the voice, bringing us to examine language as not just the voice and speech stream itself, but as part of a larger, embodied semiotic system.

Research in sociolinguistics (and sociophonetics) has long relied on appeals to “identity” as a means of accounting for patterns of variation in language use (for reviews of this work, see Le Page 1997; Tabouret-Keller 1997; Llamas & Watt 2010; Levon forthcoming). At its core, an appeal to “identity” as an explanatory factor is based on the assertion that linguistic differences are not (or not only) determined by physiological differences among speakers or by automatic routines established during early language socialization. Instead, identity-based approaches treat linguistic variation as a fundamentally social phenomenon, related to an individual’s positioning in society and/or their understanding and interpretation of that positioning.
Yet even within this more socially oriented body of work, “identity” remains a contentious term and academic disagreements about the utility of “identity” as an analytical concept are longstanding. Cameron & Kulick (2003), for example, famously argued that there exists an overemphasis on the use of language as a way to claim membership in an identity category in language, gender, and sexuality scholarship to the exclusion of other ways in which language and gender/sexuality may interact (including, for example, as a means for rejecting category affiliation or via a more indirect, higher-order indexical relation between language and a given social label). In response to Cameron & Kulick’s argument, Bucholtz & Hall (2004) countered that a nuanced examination of how people dynamically and relationally enact category membership is central to
this line of enquiry (see also Bucholtz & Hall 2005; Cameron & Kulick 2005). Similarly, Trudgill (2008) proposed that “identity concerns” play no role in the formation of new dialects in language contact situations and that long-term automatic accommodation between speakers can account for the developmental patterns observed in the literature. This position that was explicitly rebutted by Coupland (2008) and Holmes & Kerswill (2008), among others, who, while acknowledging the problem with “simplistic purposive accounts of identity as motive” (Coupland 2008:268), nevertheless argued that accommodation is never wholly automatic, that accommodation occurs when people—not language varieties—come into contact, and that interpersonal and intersubjective factors always play a role (see also Labov 2012). Within phonetics, proposals like Ohala’s (1983, 1994) Frequency Code and Gussenhoven’s (2004) Effort and Production Codes seek to account for patterns of sociophonetic variation via recourse to universal biological rules that are independent of social or identity-linked factors. In contrast, scholars such as Eckert (2017) have argued that, universal meaning potentials notwithstanding, agency and identity are crucial for sound symbolic meaning to be realized in interaction, such that we cannot divorce our analyses of sound symbolism from the specific social contexts in which it occurs.
Part of the reason why there is so much disagreement about the role of identity in linguistic variation is because the term “identity” is often used to refer to a number of very different things. This is due in large part to the fact that “identity” is what Giddens (1987) calls a “double hermeneutic,” a concept that is used both as a technical term of analysis in scholarly work and as a popular term for organizing experience in wider society. According to Giddens, scholarly and popular understanding of such concepts influence one another, with popular conceptualizations conscripted into scholarly work and vice versa. While not necessarily a problem in and of itself, the danger of this kind of mutual influence is a proliferation of meanings of a given term, resulting in a lack of scholarly precision and a potential degradation in the perceived merit of academic enquiry. With respect to the term “identity,” Brubaker & Cooper (2000:1) summarize the issue succinctly by stating “if identity is everywhere, identity is nowhere.” In other words, if “identity” can mean different things to different people in different contexts (e.g., an overt category membership, an in-the- moment interpersonal relation, a deeply held sense of self), what sort of analytical purchase does the term have for scholars?
It is not our intention to provide a definitive answer to this question in the current chapter. Instead, our goal is to provide an overview of the different ways in which the issue of identity has been approached in sociophonetics. We begin in the next section with a brief introduction to Brubaker & Cooper’s system for classifying different treatments of identity in social research into three broad categories: identity as category positioning (by self or other), identity as the expression of commonality or groupness, and identity as situated subjectivity. We use this system not as a prescriptive taxonomy, but as a way to organize our review of sociophonetic research on identity, demonstrating how examinations of variation in both speech perception and production have contributed to each of these areas. Through this review, we hope to demonstrate the relevance of identity-linked questions to sociophonetic investigation and to outline some of the different ways in which the topic can be approached.

This article examines how the “arbitrary content of culture” (Bourdieu 1977) comes to be inscribed onto patterns of sociolinguistic variation. Specifically, we consider the role of iconicity in this process. Studies of iconicity and variation to date have tended to focus on the iconic properties of the speech signal itself (e.g., an association between higher-frequency sounds and smallness). We bring these ideas about sound symbolism into dialogue with research on embodied behavioral codes, which link particular forms of bodily comportment and their associated qualia with specific social categories and positions. We suggest that certain claims about sound symbolic meanings may be better interpreted as derived effects of socially meaningful bodily hexis. Our arguments are illustrated through a consideration of two variables, both of which have received widespread attention in the literature on variation in English: the backing and lowering of the short front vowels and the fronting/backing of /s/. We discuss how treating these variables from the perspective of socially inculcated bodies can provide a unified account of their observed sociolinguistic patterning and help to shed light on how variables accrue social meaning more generally.

Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate voice-related outcomes of long-term androgen treatment in trans male individuals. Methods: Trans male individuals who were under hormone treatment for at least one year were evaluated. Self-Perception of Voice Masculinity (SPVM) scale, adapted Transsexual Voice Questionnaire for trans males (a-TVQ), Voice-related Quality of Life (V-RQOL), and the mean fundamental frequency (f0) were used to assess voice outcomes. Results: Of the thirteen trans male individuals in this study, the mean age was 26.15 years. The median SPVM was 4, which equated to “somewhat male”. The median f0 was 119 Hz and did not differ from Turkish cisgender male normative data. The median a-TVQ scores showed a decreasing trend and the median V-RQOL scale scores showed an increasing trend in accordance with the decrease of median f0 scores. Two individuals were within a gender ambiguous f0 range and a failure rate of 15.4% was observed. Of these two individuals who w...

Voice is an important gender marker in the transition process as a transgender individual accepts a new gender identity. The objectives of this study were to describe and relate aspects of a perceptual-auditory analysis and the fundamental frequency (F0) of male-to-female (MtF) transsexual individuals. A case-control study was carried out with individuals aged 19-52 years who attended the Gender Identity Program of the Hospital de Clínicas of Porto Alegre. Vocal recordings from the MtF transgender and cisgender individuals (vowel /a:/ and six phrases of Consensus Auditory Perceptual Evaluation Voice [CAPE-V]) were edited and randomly coded before storage in a Dropbox folder. The voices (vowel /a:/) were analyzed by consensus on the same day by two judge speech therapists who had more than 10 years of experience in the voice area using the GRBASI perceptual-auditory vocal evaluation scale. Acoustic analysis of the voices was performed using the advanced Multi-Dimensional Voice Program software. The resonance focus and the degrees of masculinity and femininity for each voice recording were determined by listening to the CAPE-V phrases, for the same judges. There were significant differences between the groups regarding a greater frequency of subjects with F0 between 80 and 150 Hz (P = 0.003), and a greater frequency of hypernasal resonant focus (P < 0.001) in the MtF cases and greater frequency of subjects with absence of roughness (P = 0.031) in the control group. The MtF group of individuals showed altered vertical resonant focus, more masculine voices, and lower fundamental frequencies. The control group showed a significant absence of roughness.

Esta revisión recoge 69 estudios sociofonéticos sobre el habla con pluma masculina para poner en perspectiva qué parámetros acústicos caracterizan tanto a los hablantes homosexuales como a aquellos que, independientemente de su orientación sexual, son percibidos como hablantes con pluma. La muestra de estudios seleccionada recoge un total de 13 lenguas, algunas con un gran número de variedades dialectales, como es el caso del inglés o del español. En muchas de estas lenguas se han hallado diferencias significativas en la producción o percepción del habla gay para la frecuencia fundamental, Palabras clave: habla gay; pluma; sociofonética; estudio interlingüístico.

While the perception of sexual orientation in voices often relies on stereotypes, it is unclear whether speech stereotypes and accurate perceptions of sexual orientation are each based on acoustic cues common to speakers of a given group. We ask if the stereotypical belief, that members of the same sexual orientation group share similar acoustic patterns, is accurate to some degree. To address this issue, we are the first to use a novel voice morphing technique to create voice averages from voices that represent extremes of a given sexual orientation group either in terms of actual or perceived sexual orientation. Importantly, averaging preserves only those acoustic cues shared by the original speakers. 144 German listeners judged the sexual orientation of twelve natural-sounding sentence stimuli, each representing an average of five original utterances. Half of the averages were based on targets' self-ratings of sexual orientation: On a 7-point Kinsey-like scale, we selected targets who were most typical for a certain sexual orientation group according to their self-identifications. The other half were based on extreme ratings by others (i.e., on speech-related sexual-orientation stereotypes). Listeners judged sexual orientation from the voice averages with above-chance accuracy suggesting 1) that the perception of actual and stereotypical sexual orientation, respectively, are based on acoustic cues shared by speakers of the same group, and 2) that the stereotypical belief that members of the same sexual orientation group share similar acoustic patterns is accurate to some degree. Mean fundamental frequency and other common acoustic parameters showed systematic variation depending on speaker gender and sexual orientation. Effects of sexual orientation were more pronounced for stereotypical voice averages than for those based on speakers' self-ratings, suggesting that sexual-orientation stereotypes exaggerate even those differences present in the most salient groups of speakers. Implications of our findings for stereotyping and discrimination are discussed.

Differences between male and female speakers have been explained in terms of biological inevitabilities but also in terms of behavioral and socially motivated factors. The aim of this study is to investigate the latter by examining genderspecific variability within the same gender. The speech of 29 German men and women-all of them expecting their first child but varying in the time they plan to stay at home during their child's first year (parental role)-is analyzed. Acoustic analyses comprise the vowel space size and the realization of the inter-sibilant contrast. While the data is part of a larger longitudinal project investigating adult-and infant-directed speech during the infant's first year of life, this study concentrates on the recordings made before the birth of the child. Inter-speaker variability is investigated in relation to 1) the chosen parental role and 2) self-ascribed ratings on positive feminine attributes (gender identity). Results show that both factors (planned duration of parental leave and the femininity ratings) contribute to the variability found between, but also within the same gender. In particular, the vowel space size was found to be positively correlated with self-ascribed femininity ratings in male speakers.

Gender is a culturally-dependent construct that can be associated with categories of humans, abstract concepts, and even words English has very limited grammatical gender, removing that interaction and leaving words with culturally defined gender associations regardless of their sounds or structure [3] Grammatical and conceptual gender are not always congruent and may interact cognitively to influence the genders that people associate with words and their meanings [2]

The folk linguistic notion that there are systematic differences in speech production as a function of sexual orientation has given rise to a vast body of work investigating the acoustic correlates of sounding queer. Although gay-sounding voices and to a lesser extent lesbiansounding voices are well represented in this literature, bisexuality is conspicuously absent. The current study addresses this gap through an acoustic analysis of bisexuals' read speech vis-àvis lesbian, gay, and straight speakers, specifically attending to three measures of the fricative /s/: center of gravity, skew, and duration. The results suggest that bisexual women and men do not form a cohesive group in terms of /s/ production. Moreover, the results indicate that bisexual women differ from lesbian and straight women in a way that is distinct from how bisexual men differ from gay and straight men. Given these results, I argue that (1) grouping bisexual speakers with either straight or lesbian/gay speakers is not empirically justified and (2) the lack of uniformity among the bisexual speakers is potentially explained by the different ways in which bisexual women and men experience the intersection of sexuality and gender normativity. Overall, these findings trouble the stereotype that bisexuality is simply an amalgam of lesbianness/gayness and straightness and shed light on the intersectional experiences of bisexuals.

A service evaluation was undertaken with 10 participants identifying as trans men who received voice and communication group therapy and 12-month follow-up at the London Gender Identity Clinic between February 2017 and March 2018, to investigate levels of satisfaction, how helpful they found the program in facilitating vocal change and skill development, and whether they would recommend it to others. Methods: Participant evaluations of overall and ideal rating of masculinity of voice, and level of feeling comfortable with voice, evaluations of voice skills and changes in speaking and reading fundamental frequency were retrospectively reviewed and analyzed. Results: Six participants reported being very satisfied with the service; four were satisfied. Eight participants found the program very helpful in achieving voice and communication change; two found it helpful. Eight strongly agreed and two agreed with recommending the service. Participants' overall and comfort ratings of voice significantly increased (p < 0.01), while there was no significant change in ideal ratings (p = 0.063), and a significant decrease in the difference between overall and ideal ratings (p < 0.01). Participants achieved a significant decrease in fundamental frequency for reading and speaking (p < 0.01), a significant decrease in voice fatigue (p = 0.039) and restriction in voice adaptability (p < 0.01), a significant increase in confidence in public speaking (p < 0.01), but no significant change in vocal projection (p = 0.07). Conclusion: Ten trans men reported high levels of satisfaction with the voice group program and long-term follow-up, making significant positive shifts in voice skills and vocal self-perception. These findings apply locally but suggest appropriate interventions toward a transmasculine voice modification protocol.

This paper examines how speakers from a non-binary community of practice located in the Greater Toronto Area make variable use of (ING) in order to construct non-binary transgender identities while navigating spaces that they experience as safe or non-safe. I explore how two central members of this community exhibit stronger variant preferences in non-queer spaces, as opposed to queer spaces, in order to create stances of resistance to cis-normative gender ideologies and index their non-binary identities. For this group, non-safe-spaces often require a degree of conscious identity work in order to avoid being misgendered as their gender-assigned-at-birth, an insight that was reflected in their linguistic production. By drawing together meta-commentary and patterns in (ING) production, I show how the safeness of a space is constituted in part through the constraints placed on non-binary speakers' linguistic performances. This research provides a perspective on gender identity and its interaction with place by highlighting the importance of linguistic production in particular interactions.

Self-recordings, when speakers record themselves without a researcher present, are attractive for potentially eliciting a wider range of styles than is obtained through interviews. To compare the stylistic differences between self-recorded speech and interview speech, we present an analysis of sibilant production among four speakers in both contexts. Our results show that the contrast between selfrecordings and interviews can be a reliable predictor, with differences often surpassing those between interview speech and read speech. We suggest that self-recordings may be stylistically different enough from interviews to justify overcoming the practical challenges of their collection, integrating the selfrecording into standard sociolinguistic methodologies, at least for studies of intraspeaker variation and the description of variable phenomena. This working paper is available in University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol23/iss2/11

Sociolinguistic data collection traditionally includes interviews, reading passages, and word lists (Labov 1972). Researchers have increasingly sought out elicitation tasks that have the benefits of tasks based on reading aloud (e.g., studying infrequently occurring variables; controlling for linguistic factors; eliciting the same lexical items across participants) while also eliciting styles more comparable to interview speech (see Drager 2018). Examples include the Map Task (Brown et al. 1984) and the Diapix task (Baker and Hazan 2011). Other researchers have turned instead to elicitation tasks that maximize ecological validity, taking themselves out of the recording context and training participants to collect field recordings (e.g., Podesva 2007; Sharma 2011). But how comparable is the speech elicited from each of these tasks? Building on results from previous research (Boyd et al. 2015; Hall-Lew and Boyd 2017) we consider three US English speakers’ vowel productions from interv...

Pre-pubertal boys and girls speak with acoustically different voices despite the absence of a clear anatomical dimorphism in the vocal apparatus, suggesting that a strong component of the expression of gender through the voice is behavioural. Initial evidence for this hypothesis was found in a previous study showing that children can alter their voice to sound like a boy or like a girl. However, whether they can spontaneously modulate these voice components within their own gender in order to vary the expression of their masculinity and femininity remained to be investigated. Here, seventy-two English-speaking children aged 6–10 were asked to give voice to child characters varying in masculine and feminine stereotypicality to investigate whether primary school children spontaneously adjust their sex-related cues in the voice—fundamental frequency (F0) and formant spacing (ΔF)—along gender stereotypical lines. Boys and girls masculinized their voice, by loweringF0 and ΔF, when impers...

This paper examines the indexical value of /s/-fronting in White Afrikaans and in White South African English (WSAfE). Prior research on this feature has shown that fronted articulations of /s/ in WSAfE serve as a regional and social indicator of the wealthy northern suburbs of Johannesburg, and anecdotal evidence suggests that the feature carries a similar meaning in White Afrikaans. This study therefore aims to examine whether the variable carries similar meanings across the two languages. Data are based on the evaluative reactions toward different experimental stimuli that were presented to 214 Afrikaans-English bilinguals in South Africa during a modified matched-guise task. The results indicate that /s/-fronting in a man’s voice is perceived in similar terms in White Afrikaans and WSAfE though it carries somewhat different meanings across the two languages when it occurs in a woman’s voice, a difference related in turn to different approaches to gender across the two speech communities. The article ends with some discussion relating to the possible source of the relevant similarities and differences, i.e., parallel innovation or sociophonetic transfer.

Keywords: /s/-fronting, Afrikaans, White South African English, perception,
South Africa

In this paper, we revisit the impact of gender and social class on language (e.g., Eckert 1989, 2000, Labov 1990, Milroy et al. 1994, Dubois and Horvath 1999) through an investigation of /s/ in southeast England. Previous work on /s/ variation in English has suggested that, for a number of varieties, backer, more [ʃ] like variants are associated with males while more fronted realizations are associated with women, and, in some varieties, also gay men (e.g., Munson et al. 2006). Subsequent work in the UK has also indicated that for some speakers /s/ may also be associated with class (Stuart-Smith 2007). Our study contributes to this area through examining the possible interaction of class and gender with regards to /s/ realization. Our data come from two British television programs: Made in Chelsea and The Only Way is Essex. These programs are both &quot;scripted reality&quot; shows that follow a group of young friends in the greater London area. The class stratified sample – upper-c...

The ideology of “the gay lisp” has inspired numerous quantitative studies examining the relationship between /s/ production and sexuality in American English (e.g. Linville 1998; Munson et al. 2006a; Zimman 2013). There are two key gaps in this literature. First, research in this area typically focuses on monosexual (i.e. lesbian, gay, and straight) speakers to the exclusion of bisexuality. Second, work in this area rarely considers the intersection of sexuality with factors outside of gender or sex, and to a lesser extent geographic location (e.g. Campbell-Kibler 2011; Podesva & Hofwegen 2014). This article addresses these disparities by (1) centralizing bisexual speakers and (2) attending to social factors such as race, place, age, and their intersections in the analysis. To that end, we build upon previous work by Willis (forthcoming) and apply a random forest (Breiman 2001) to /s/ center of gravity measurements. In doing so, we follow Tagliamonte and Baayen (2012) in demonstrati...

The ideology of “the gay lisp” has inspired numerous quantitative studies examining the relationship between /s/ production and sexuality in American English (e.g. Linville 1998; Munson et al. 2006a; Zimman 2013). There are two key gaps in this literature. First, research in this area typically focuses on monosexual (i.e. lesbian, gay, and straight) speakers to the exclusion of bisexuality. Second, work in this area rarely considers the intersection of sexuality with factors outside of gender or sex, and to a lesser extent geographic location (e.g. Campbell-Kibler 2011; Podesva & Hofwegen 2014). This article addresses these disparities by (1) centralizing bisexual speakers and (2) attending to social factors such as race, place, age, and their intersections in the analysis. To that end, we build upon previous work by Willis (forthcoming) and apply a random forest (Breiman 2001) to /s/ center of gravity measurements. In doing so, we follow Tagliamonte and Baayen (2012) in demonstrati...

Human beings have certain uniqueness in their voices that helps determine their individuality. The most important characteristic of voice is the Pitch. The average vocal range for masculine voice ranges from 90- 150 Hz and for feminine voice, it ranges from 190-240 Hz. This pitch is decided by the development of the vocal tract during puberty by the effect of testosterone hormone i.e. Longer the tract, lower the pitch and vice versa. However, for people belonging to the intersex community, the low production of testosterone causes the vocal tract to develop differently than males and females. Because of this reason, their pitch has its own individual range and hoarseness of quality. This study was aimed to evaluate the difference in intersex population voice characteristics as compared to normal adult males and females. It was found that intersex voice has a distinctive Pitch range of 150-190 Hz with the mean frequency being 167 Hz. It was also discovered that due the peculiar diale...

The ideology of "the gay lisp" has inspired numerous quantitative studies examining the relationship between /s/ production and sexuality in American English (e.g., Linville 1998; Munson et al. 2006a; Zimman 2013). There are two key gaps in this literature. First, research in this area typically focuses on monosexual (i.e. lesbian, gay, and straight) speakers to the exclusion of bisexuality. Second, work in this area rarely considers the intersection of sexuality with factors outside of gender or sex, and to a lesser extent geographic location (e.g., Campbell-Kibler 2011; Podesva & Hofwegen 2014). This article addresses these disparities by (1) centralizing bisexual speakers and (2) attending to social factors such as race, place, age, and their intersections in the analysis. To that end, we build upon previous work by Willis (forthcoming) and apply a random forest (Breiman 2001) to /s/ center of gravity measurements. In doing so, we follow Tagliamonte & Baayen (2012) in demonstrating the utility of random forests as an approach to quantitative sociolinguistic analysis. Ultimately, the analysis underscores the need to attend to power structures and biases within research practice: the monosexist ideologies of sexuality and gender normativity that obfuscate bisexuality, and the privileging of whiteness that permeates quantitative studies of sexuality and the voice.

Background: Voice and communication modification training is a critical aspect of the gender affirmation process for many transgender people. Incongruence between communication characteristics and gender positioning can be a cause of gender dysphoria and lead to misattribution or being outed as a transgender person, which can have significant negative social consequences (e.g., discrimination, physical harm). Consequently, identifying the characteristics of communication that contribute most to conveying one's gender and masculinity-femininity is important for informing voice and communication modification training practices. Objective: The two main objectives of my doctoral research were to 1) Identify a set of communication-based predictors (i.e., acoustic and nonverbal communication measures) of subjective ratings related to gender attribution; and 2) Explore relationships between communication characteristics and self-rated outcomes of femininity, communication satisfaction, and quality of life (QoL) for transgender women. Methods: The objectives of my doctoral research were met through the completion of four studies. Data collection for all four studies occurred at one time, across two phases. In the first phase, communication and QoL data were collected from a group of transgender women and cisgender communicators (n = 40). The communicators' voices and gestures were captured during a cartoon retell task via simultaneous acoustic and motion-capture recordings. A unique constellation of 11 acoustic and six gestural variables subsequently were measured in 30-45 second samples of these recordings or in two standard speech tasks recorded during the same data collection session. In the second phase of data collection, a group of raters (n = 20) provided gender attribution and masculinity-femininity ratings for each communicator. These ratings were based on iii samples of the cartoon description recordings presented in three modes: audio only (i.e., audio track), visual only (i.e., point-light display), and audiovisual (i.e., audio track and point-light display). Raters also rated vocal naturalness in the audio-only condition. The first study identified a set of acoustic predictors of gender attribution, masculinity-femininity, and vocal naturalness ratings obtained in the audio-only presentation mode. The second study identified a set of communication-based (i.e., acoustic and gestural) predictors of masculinity-femininity ratings obtained in the audiovisual presentation mode. That study also explored differences in the perceptual ratings as a function of audio, visual, or audiovisual modes. The third study explored relationships between the set of communication variables and self-rated femininity, communication satisfaction, and QoL for the transgender women participants (n = 20). The fourth study investigated differences in motion-based nonverbal communication behaviors between groups based on gender attribution and gender positioning. Results: Significant predictors of masculinity-femininity ratings in audio and audiovisual modes included speaking fundamental frequency (fo) (p < .001; p <.001), average formant frequency (p = .001; p = .006), and sound pressure level (SPL) (p = .001; p = .001). Fo was the sole predictor of gender attribution ratings in the audio-only mode (p = .047), and fo (p = .002), average formant frequency (p = .001), and rate of speech (p .022) were identified as significant predictors of vocal naturalness ratings. Masculinityfemininity ratings obtained in the audio-only mode were significantly more feminine than those made in the audiovisual mode (p < .001). Visual only mode masculinity-femininity ratings were not reliable. Three significant relationships were revealed between the communication variables and subjective ratings made by the transgender women iv participants: 1) Use of palm-up hand gestures was negatively related to gestural femininity ratings (rs =-.462, p = .040); 2) Use of palm-up hand gestures was negatively related to overall communication satisfaction (rs =-.572, p = .008); and 3) Mean semitone range across utterances was positively related to overall QoL (r = .463, p = .040). Finally, cisgender women used vertical head movements (e.g., nodding) significantly more than transgender women [F(2,36) = 5.06, p = .012]. Conclusions: The results of my doctoral research advanced our understanding of the ways in which voice and communication characteristics contribute to gender presentations and attributions, and how they relate to subjective ratings of femininity, communication satisfaction, and QoL for transgender women. Together, these studies add to the growing evidence base informing voice and communication modification training and, ultimately, have the potential to positively impact quality of life and life participation outcomes for transgender and gender diverse people. v Preface This thesis is an original work by Teresa L. D. Hardy. The research project, of which this thesis is a part, received research ethics approval from the University of Alberta Research Ethics Board, Project Name "Talking the talk and walking the walk: Communication and quality of life in the male-to-female transgender population", Pro00060133, February 3, 2016. This research project also received operational approvals from Northern Alberta Clinical Trials and Research Centre (NACTRC) and Covenant Health Research Centre. Chapter 2 of this thesis has been published as Hardy, T. L. D., Rieger, J. M., Wells, K., & Boliek, C. A. (2018). Acoustic predictors of gender attribution, masculinity-femininity, and vocal naturalness ratings amongst transgender and cisgender speakers.

The purpose of this case series pilot study was twofold. First, to add to the results from this experimental case series to the dearth of research on vocal therapy interventions provided by speech-language pathologists to transgender clients. Second, it piloted the Combination Voice and Communication (CVC) therapy to better understand the components of this therapy related to the feminization of the voice and communication for male to female (MTF) trans individuals. Method: Two MTF participants were randomly selected from a pool of 4 participants and were randomly assigned to a team of clinicians. CVC therapy was delivered once a week for 50 minutes for seven weeks. It targeted pitch, breathiness, oral resonance, verbal communication, and nonverbal communication. Naïve listeners, clinicians, and participants judged vocal femininity and gender. Results: Naïve listeners, clinicians, and the participants perceived both participants as sounding more feminine after participating in CVC therapy. The perceived increase in femininity after therapy by naïve listeners was found to be statistically significant with a large effect size. Nearly half of naïve listeners perceived Participant 1's gender as "female" after therapy, however, Participant 2 was still perceived by the majority of naïve listeners as "male". Additionally, both participants reported dramatically better vocal quality of life scores after therapy. Conclusion: CVC therapy is a successful model for voice and communication feminization for MTF transgender individuals. Results suggested that a number of targets could be trained in a particular set of therapy sessions and minutes with the implementation of a home program. Findings from this study have the potential to guide future voice therapy intervention models with lasting effects on the feminization of the voice.

This paper promotes a sophisticated treatment of gender in variationism through a large-scale quantitative analysis of creak, a nonmodal voice quality stereotypically associated with women in US English. An analysis of our gender-diverse corpus, including cisgender, transgender, and nonbinary individuals, finds that gender does not predict variation; all gender groups produce high rates of creak. However, gender does interact with style: all speakers use more creak in interview speech compared with read speech, but some groups style-shift more than others, suggesting that gender remains a relevant factor in capturing how creak is deployed as a resource in social practice. We use this analysis to advocate for a move beyond the gender binary in quantitative descriptions of sociolinguistic variables and call for the greater inclusion of trans+ individuals in sociolinguistics.

The present study aims to shed light on how trans people discursively reproduce gendered habitus with regard to semantic means, following from the masculine or feminine designation in Roman languages. For this purpose, 11 interviews were conducted with trans women in prison, work, and private settings in Italy. In addition, three trans people who preferred not to be interviewed shared their diaries. By critically investigating the collected data, the discursive, relational, and symbolic processes, which define the (con)textual structure of gender, were accessed, and the qualiquantitative ALCESTE software was adopted for lexicometric analysis. The results show that the sexualized, dualistic coordinates of the Italian language, on one hand, promote an outward identity conforming to a heteronormative representation of gender, whereas interactions within the private sphere, on the other hand, empower trans people's agency in claiming a peculiar and authentic sense of self. Trans people actually are talking and, consequently, doing gender through the gendered semantics of Italian in everyday life and are undoing gender through the emotional bonds in intimate situations. Coping strategies, based on positive affectivity, should be implemented therefore in all social, institutional, and clinical policies that are devoted to promoting assistance and support for trans people who suffer stigmatization, marginalization, and physical and institutional violence.

Research on heterosexual mating has demonstrated that acoustic parameters (e.g., pitch) of men’s voices influence their attractiveness to women and appearance of status and formidability to other men. However, little is known about how men’s tendency to clearly articulate their speech influences these important social perceptions. In the current study, we used a repeated-measures design to investigate how men’s articulatory clarity or conformity influenced women’s (N = 45) evaluations of men’s attractiveness for both short- and long-term relationships, and men&#39;s (N = 46) evaluations of physical formidability and prestige. Results largely supported our hypotheses: men who enunciated phonemes more distinctly were more attractive to women for long-term relationships than short-term relationships and were perceived by other men to have higher prestige than physical dominance. These findings suggest that aspects of articulatory behavior that influence perceptions of prestige and long...

 Cross-sectional study, with 50 FM-transsexual persons at least 9 months after sex reassignment surgery (SRS). All participants received hormone therapy at least 2 years before SRS  Voice recordings and analyses were made with Praat version 5.1.18.  Voice appreciation was evaluated by the participants and a panel consisting of an endocrinologist, a dermatologist and two medical students. Conclusions:  The male standard frequency is achieved in a large majority of the FtM transsexuals persons.

In the American film Gran Torino (2008), Clint Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a retired Polish-American assembly-line worker in Detroit who is resentful of the changed character of his old white workingclass neighbourhood, which now has a significant community of Hmong refugees from Laos and their American-born children. A Hmong family lives next door. Despite his racist feelings, Walt develops a protective mentoring friendship with Thao, the teenage son of the family, and decides to help him get a job in construction. But first, Walt tells Thao, 'I have to man you up a little bit' so that he seems the kind of person who would fit 'naturally' into the specific male culture of the construction site. Walt takes Thao to visit his Italian-American barber, Martin, so that Thao can learn 'how guys talk', and tells him, 'Listen to the way Martin and I batter it back and forth.' This is the exchange as Walt enters Martin's shop: MARTIN Perfect-a Polack and a Chink WALT How y'doin' Martin, you crazy Italian prick? MARTIN Walt, you cheap bastard, I shoulda known you'd come in, I was havin' such a pleasant day WALT Whadya do, jew some poor blind guy out of his money? Give him the wrong change? MARTIN Who's the Nip? WALT Oh he's a pussy kid from next door. .. I'm just tryin' to man him up a little bit WALT [TURNING TO THAO] Y'see kid? Now that's how guys talk to one another. . .

The paper explores non-standard /s/ and sentence-final rise in pitch as linguistic features connected to Finnish-speaking gay men’s speech, utilising Eckert’s (2008) concept of the indexical field and discourse analysis. The paper sheds light on the other social meanings these features have and the ideological connections these social meanings then have on the image of a stereotypical gay man. The data consists of recorded interviews with self-identified gay men, online chats, and a sketch from a Finnish TV show called Putous.

The standard /s/ in Finnish is a voiceless alveolar fricative, although the phonetic realisation of /s/ shows a notable amount of variation. Furthermore, Finnish intonation patterns are typically described as falling. In the light of the data, frontal or otherwise non-standard /s/ sound and sentence-final rise in pitch have various social meanings related to regional identities and gender, in addition to gay masculinity. Previous research, such as Halonen & Vaattovaara (2017), has linked /s/ variation and pitch rise to the social categories of femininity and urbanity, or more specifically, the Helsinki area. On the contrary, these traits are not commonly associated with straight male speech. In the data, gay masculinity is often constructed in opposition to traits connected to normative masculinity in Finland, including rurality and authenticity. Drawing on Zimman’s (2013) work, this paper suggests that the relationship between the linguistic features and the social category of gay maleness can be perceived through the characteristics linked to stereotypical gay masculinity on the one hand and through stereotypical straight masculinity on the other.

The research shows that non-standard /s/ and sentence-final rise in pitch carry several different social meanings, all of which are ideologically linked to gay masculinity in the context of this research. The paper outlines ways to understand why certain linguistic features have come to index gay masculinity in Finnish, thus opening new perspectives on Finnish queer linguistics.

In recent years, interest in variation has grown well beyond sociolinguistics, with benefits on all sides. the field of sociophonetics now brings together communities of people asking quite different questions about phonetic and phonological variation, as laboratory phoneticians and sociolinguists bring distinct theoretical and methodological expertise and concerns to the table. this special issue is based on a panel on sociolinguistic variation and sexuality organized by the Committee on the Status of Women in linguistics at the 2010 annual meeting of the linguistics Society of American (lSA). the purpose of the panel was to speed up the emerging collaboration among researchers from phonetics and from sociolinguistics who are working on issues of sexuality, as well as to inform the lSA membership of important issues raised in the study of sexuality. particularly important in this enterprise is bringing together the more complex models of social variation that have been developed in recent years in the study of sociolinguistic variation with the phonetic and experimental advances of laboratory phonetics. to the extent that researchers are squarely planted in their own subdisciplines, each tends to use fairly two-dimensional representations of the other. the ubiquitous F1-F2 vowel plot that dominates work in sociolinguistics gets at a very small dimension of the phonetic signals that even individual vowels bring to the stylistic table. Similarly, two-dimensional categories such as male or female, gay or straight, offer very blunt social-analytical instruments. this may caricature the work done in this field, but we do so in order to emphasize the importance of bringing together the richness of phonetic and social analysis in any sociophonetic study. experimental studies of speech perception and field studies of production provide important complementary methods and can be most productively done iteratively and in close consultation. As a long-term goal, we seek to bring together theoretical developments in social constructionist approaches to sexuality; advances in the development of cognitive models that incorporate both linguistic and social information; and methodologi

Human beings have certain uniqueness in their voices that helps determine their individuality. The most important characteristic of voice is the Pitch. The average vocal range for masculine voice ranges from 90- 150 Hz and for feminine voice, it ranges from 190-240 Hz. This pitch is decided by the development of the vocal tract during puberty by the effect of testosterone hormone i.e. Longer the tract, lower the pitch and vice versa. However, for people belonging to the intersex community, the low production of testosterone causes the vocal tract to develop differently than males and females. Because of this reason, their pitch has its own individual range and hoarseness of quality. This study was aimed to evaluate the difference in intersex population voice characteristics as compared to normal adult males and females. It was found that intersex voice has a distinctive Pitch range of 150-190 Hz with the mean frequency being 167 Hz. It was also discovered that due the peculiar diale...

There is small amount of research conducted on “gay focused linguistic scholarship” and its counterpart in Arabic-gay-sociolinguistics is virtually non-existent. The present paper raises the issue of the existence of gay community in the Arab world. On the basis of empirical investigations, field-direct and indirect observations, interviews as well as random questionnaire, we hypothesize that there exists a gay speech community in (at least in the studied countries) the Arab world for we investigate and determine its social and linguistic dimensions. This lead us to find out the discursive criteria which characterize modes of gay-speak that are part of their identity. After comparing them to women’s talk, we assume, however, that in spite of this high rate of assimilation in language behavior at the phonological, lexical, and even gestural ones, gays cannot be defined as “women” nor can they be classified as a separate gender or third sex (as other studies claim).

In the American film Gran Torino (2008), Clint Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a retired Polish-American assembly-line worker in Detroit who is resentful of the changed character of his old white workingclass neighbourhood, which now has a significant community of Hmong refugees from Laos and their American-born children. A Hmong family lives next door. Despite his racist feelings, Walt develops a protective mentoring friendship with Thao, the teenage son of the family, and decides to help him get a job in construction. But first, Walt tells Thao, 'I have to man you up a little bit' so that he seems the kind of person who would fit 'naturally' into the specific male culture of the construction site. Walt takes Thao to visit his Italian-American barber, Martin, so that Thao can learn 'how guys talk', and tells him, 'Listen to the way Martin and I batter it back and forth.' This is the exchange as Walt enters Martin's shop: MARTIN Perfect-a Polack and a Chink WALT How y'doin' Martin, you crazy Italian prick? MARTIN Walt, you cheap bastard, I shoulda known you'd come in, I was havin' such a pleasant day WALT Whadya do, jew some poor blind guy out of his money? Give him the wrong change? MARTIN Who's the Nip? WALT Oh he's a pussy kid from next door. .. I'm just tryin' to man him up a little bit WALT [TURNING TO THAO] Y'see kid? Now that's how guys talk to one another. . .

Robust sex differences in environmentalism have been observed, such that males express fewer pro-environmental attitudes than their female counterparts. To date, most explanations of this sex difference have relied upon socio-cultural and psychological explanations. The present study sought to extend this inquiry by examining the role of testosterone (T), its interaction with cortisol (C), as well as androgen-linked phenotypes (facial and vocal masculinization) in relation to environmental attitudes. In a sample of 162 males, results found a TxC interaction such that high T predicted lower environmental attitudes when C was high, but T also predicted higher environmental attitudes at the lowest levels of C. Moreover, facial and vocal masculinization, as putative phenotypic markers of developmental T exposure, correlated negatively with pro-environmental attitudes. Together these findings suggest that both state T and phenotypic masculinization negatively predict environmentalism among men, thus highlighting the potential role of androgens in understanding environmental engagement.

This article analyses identity constructions and representations of self-identifying transgender individuals on a web-based forum. Although the forum is aimed towards all transgender users, the primary user-group are transfeminine users (intending on) undergoing medico-surgical interventions to align their physiology and identity. The data for this analysis are initial text posts from the forum board used for introductions (i.e. new users of the forum introducing themselves). The article assumes that introductions are the context in which one asserts key identity features; hence, this board is the most pertinent for analysing identity construction. In this article, I use a combination of corpus linguistics and Critical Discourse Studies tools to analyse the use of pronouns and gender-indexical nouns in identity constructions and the representation of social categorisations. This article is an attempt to demonstrate that transgender is not a collective homogeneous identity, and that ...

Introduction and Objectives. This article explores the interaction between voice and gender relations in the context of radio broadcasting education. The research speaks to the gender inequalities that are increasingly being questioned, especially by younger generations. Methodology. We have employed Critical Discourse Analysis in a corpus of twenty texts elaborated by the students of Radio National de España's Master's Degree. They were asked to write a reflection on their personal experiences with voice, drawing connections to their gender identities. Results and Conclusions. The results show a previous knowledge and acceptance of gender theories, their relationship with radio dogmas, and their resistance and creativity in the face of voice normalization.

This study reports findings from in-depth semistructured interviews with 20 transgender-identifying individuals to understand how they negotiate privacy while crowdfunding to finance top surgery. Participants expressed privacy concerns about the body becoming public and fears of being criticized or attacked. Crowdfunding also necessitated a discussion of the fact that participants had breasts, which was distressing to some. Despite all of this, most participants embraced the crowdfunding experience as an opportunity to share their stories and to reject what they viewed as the normal trans narrative as too narrow. Findings suggest an intensification of privacy calculus theory as it applies to individuals from marginalized communities: Perceived costs and benefits of online disclosure may be greater when publicizing an identity that is often subject to attack. In addition to privacy calculus theory, we use the identity shift framework and taxonomies of privacy to explore tensions betw...

The aim of the study was to verify the answers to the transsexual voice questionnaire for male-to-female transsexual (TVQ MtF ) people given to individuals who participated in the Gender Identity Program (PROTIG) at the Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre, Brazil, in relation to some of their demographic characteristics, visualperceptual evaluations of the face, laryngeal prominence, and auditoryperceptual judgments of voice. Methods. In this cross-sectional study, 47 transsexual women aged between 18 and 50 responded to the (TVQ MtF ). The demographic data and perceptual ratings were selected from the PROTIG database. Results. Among all participants, 55.32% had completed secondary education, and 72.34% had not undergone a sex reassignment surgery; 4.2% of subjects did not use hormones, 23.40% had undergone speech therapy, the average number of years of experience in the female role was 13.98 years, and the participants had been definitively crossdressing for 5-34 years. Most of the participants had low scores on the (TVQ MtF ), and significant differences in the total score were observed in accordance with age (higher scores were observed among those <30 years and ≥40 years old) and visual-perceptual evaluations of the face (higher scores were observed in the individual evaluated with masculine face). There were no significant correlations between the total score obtained by the participants and the other demographic variables. Conclusions. Although most of the participants had low scores on the (TVQ MtF ), some individuals were still experiencing distress due to being perceived as being of the opposite sex or were dissatisfied with their voices.

There is small amount of research conducted on “gay focused linguistic scholarship” and its counterpart in Arabic-gay-sociolinguistics is virtually non-existent. The present paper raises the issue of the existence of gay community in the Arab world. On the basis of empirical investigations, field-direct and indirect observations, interviews as well as random questionnaire, we hypothesize that there exists a gay speech community in (at least in the studied countries) the Arab world for we investigate and determine its social and linguistic dimensions. This lead us to find out the discursive criteria which characterize modes of gay-speak that are part of their identity. After comparing them to women’s talk, we assume, however, that in spite of this high rate of assimilation in language behavior at the phonological, lexical, and even gestural ones, gays cannot be defined as “women” nor can they be classified as a separate gender or third sex (as other studies claim).

Mateos de Manuel, Victoria (2013) "Philosophy of gesture: a queer feminist perspective"/ moderation of the panel "Towards a queer iconology or how to decolonize images", Somatechnics International Conference "Missing Links: The Somatechnics of Decolonization" (June 17th-19th), Gender Studies Department, Linköping University.

Most gender-based linguistic studies in literature are related to men and women only, whereas the term gender is supposed to refer to transgender people as well. People whose sex and gender do not match (GLAAD, 2010) obviously use language in a different way from men and women in some aspects. This study aims to find out the acoustic and phonological differences of male homosexual language from those of men and women. Some male to female transgender people such as transsexuals and cross-dressers speak in a distinctive way, which usually becomes a criterion of judgment for stereotyping (Medhurst, 2002: pp. 314-315) and a matter of ridicule on the part of other people. The distinctiveness of this language use may result from acoustic, anatomical, hormonal, physiological and even philosophical differences (Pepiot, 2012). This study focuses on the acoustic and phonological aspects. To identify these aspects, voice recordings of male homosexuals were manipulated in the phonology laboratory and perception tests were conducted on a control group. The results of the study confirmed that one of the most important acoustic and phonological features that differentiate male homosexual speech from male and female heterosexual speech is pitch range, in other words intonation.

The study of gay male speech has largely focused on fundamental frequency and various quantifiable aspects of /s/ (Campbell-Kibler 2012, Mack and Munson 2012, Munson 2007, Zimman 2013). In a study of the speech of three gay men from California, however, Podesva (2011) concludes that gay men may utilize salient aspects of regional dialects to express their gayness. The stylistic correlation between gayness and certain regional dialects supports Eckert’s (2008) argument that linguistic styles are centered around ideologies, rather than rigid categorical identities and Podesva (2011) urges that this phenomenon be studied further. Southern New Hampshire provides an ideal landscape to further this study, as the region and its dialect have undergone significant linguistic and ideological changes in recent decades (Stanford et al 2012, Nagy 2001). The current work examines the linguistic relationship between gayness and Southern New Hampshire ideologies in the speech of two 22-year-old gay men who grew up in Rockingham County, New Hampshire. I then quantitatively analyzed the speakers’ use and/or avoidance of phonetic variables (including various vowels and qualities of /s/) that have been shown to be perceptually and/or productively salient in gay male speech or regional dialectology in Southern New Hampshire. The analysis found two significant findings. The first was that the speakers’ /s/ was significantly “gayer sounding” in the reading task than the interview and when talking about being gay than not, showing an ideological link (at least for these speakers) between “gay sounding” speech and “proper” speech in the reading tasks. The second was that both speakers demonstrated a significantly unmerged LOT/THOUGHT, which is a salient feature of the New York City dialect and supersedes Southern New Hampshire dialect norms. Both demonstrate that social identity is a complex and multi-layered phenomenon.
Keywords: New England English, sound change, sexuality, sociophonetics, style, stance

Most gender-based linguistic studies in literature are related to men and women only, whereas the term gender is supposed to refer to transgender people as well. People whose sex and gender do not match (GLAAD, 2010) obviously use language in a different way from men and women in some aspects. This study aims to find out the acoustic and phonological differences of male homosexual language from those of men and women. Some male to female transgender people such as transsexuals and cross-dressers speak in a distinctive way, which usually becomes a criterion of judgment for stereotyping (Medhurst, 2002: pp. 314-315) and a matter of ridicule on the part of other people. The distinctiveness of this language use may result from acoustic, anatomical, hormonal, physiological and even philosophical differences (Pepiot, 2012). This study focuses on the acoustic and phonological aspects. To identify these aspects, voice recordings of male homosexuals were manipulated in the phonology laboratory and perception tests were conducted on a control group. The results of the study confirmed that one of the most important acoustic and phonological features that differentiate male homosexual speech from male and female heterosexual speech is pitch range, in other words intonation.

In this thesis I argue that foregrounding young women’s intersectional voices through an embodied sociolinguistic approach can afford a contribution to empowering sexual scripts. In doing so I demonstrate the political value in harnessing the linguistic negotiation of pleasure. To enact this goal, my research questions are: 1. How do women make sense of experiences of sexual pleasure in talk? 2. How do women construct their identities when talking about sexual pleasure? 3. How do women describe their bodies when recounting sexual pleasure?  An embodied sociolinguistics offers insight into the discursive construction of sexual embodiment, and together with a critical feminist approach, centers the voices and experiences of women. Sexual experiential embodiment entails reflexively constructed understandings of sexual pleasure and desire through attention to discursive bodies, particularly for those that are historically misrepresented.  The analysis makes use of conversations in intimate female friendships that serve as identity construction sites and reflect both agency and interdependent self-authorship. This data offers insights into the challenges of navigating various discourses in the pursuit of self-definition and is comprised of 6 hour-long conversations between 6 pairs of young female friends, as well as 4 hours of recorded focus group discussion.   My findings demonstrate that ideologies of femininity play a large role in the initial construction of the intimate conversational site which creates space for dynamic negotiations of desire, subjectivity and the multifaceted nature of sexual experiences. The continuing interaction affords constructions of complex feminist identities within neoliberal constraints. I develop this into a critique of how uncritical discourses of sexual agency can transform sexual pleasure into a neoliberal project. Embodied sociolinguistics allows access into how sexual pleasure dynamically unfolds in the discursive formulation of the body. Ultimately this culminates into a mapping of historical pleasure landscapes that illustrate the significance of foregrounding language and conversation on sexual pleasure.   Sociolinguistic investigations that seek to transform harmful hegemonic discourses are essential in the ongoing combat against entrenched rape culture. My study advocates for a culture that values discussion of female sexual pleasure. This focus is potentially more destabilizing and contestive than focusing on sexual violation because it directly challenges hetero-patriarchal culture’s hostility toward women’s agency.   The framework employed in this thesis offers significant implications for the field of language, gender and sexuality, including the further advancement of the theory of embodied sociolinguistics and a methodology of intimate insider research. Employing intersectionality allows for the queering of normative sexual practices and disrupts normative gender discourses by centering agentive feminist voices. From a critical perspective, the research contributes to building a model of pleasure activism that prioritises joy. A body-focused linguistic approach demonstrates that true transformation of our sexuality culture must begin with destabilizing the neoliberal project and moving toward collective liberation. There is no inevitability to the sexual danger script when we channel the political power of pleasure.