Cover not available

Article published In: Journal of Language and Sexuality
Vol. 8:1 (2019) ► pp.30–52

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

Materializing gay identity

An analysis of gay-sounding speech in Thai

 | Thammasat University, Bangkok, Thailand
 | National Institute of Development Administration (NIDA), Bangkok, Thailand
Published online: 7 March 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.17013.osa
Abstract
This paper aims at investigating (1) whether young Thai adults can distinguish between straight male and gay-sounding speech and (2) how listeners feel about speech sounds performed by Thai straight and gay speakers in varying situations in terms of likeability and annoyance. Two experiments were conducted: first, straight males, gay males and females listened to voice stimuli of self-identified straight males and gay males and were asked to identify the sexual orientation of the speakers; second, another three groups of listeners were asked to rate the speakers’ levels of likeability and annoyance using a 5-point Likert scale. The findings indicate that there exist voice characteristics of gay- as opposed to straight-male sounding speech. Regarding the listeners’ perception in relation to speech style in four varying situations, the results indicate that listeners’ perception is not affected by situations in which the speech is delivered.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Recent research on gay-sounding speech: Concepts and approaches
  • 3.Research questions
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1First experiment
      • 4.1.1Speakers and their task
      • 4.1.2Recording
      • 4.1.3Listeners and their tasks
      • 4.1.4Findings of the first experiment
    • 4.2Second experiment
      • 4.2.1Speakers and their task
      • 4.2.2Recording
      • 4.2.3Listeners and their task
      • 4.2.4Evaluation form
      • 4.2.5Findings of the second experiment
        • Three groups of listeners
        • Voice stimuli (from Speaker SM1, SM2, SM2toGM, and GM2) in relation to other variables
        • Situations: Formal and informal settings, and academic and non-academic contents
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (37)
References
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Callier, Patrick. 2011. Social meaning in prosodic variability. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 17(1): 39–50. <[URL]> (July 13, 2018)
Carahaly, Lynn N. 2000. Listener Accuracy in Identifying the Sexual Orientation of Male and Female Speakers. (Unpublished) MA thesis, The Ohio State University.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fasoli, Fabio, Maass, Anne, Paladino, Maria Paola & Sulpizio, Simone. 2017. Gay- and lesbian-sounding auditory cues elicit stereotyping and discrimination. Archives of Sexual Behavior 46(5): 1261–1277. <[URL]> (July 13, 2018)
Foucault, Michel. 1981. The order of discourse. In Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, Robert Young (ed), 48–78. Boston: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gaudio, Rudolf P. 1994. Sounding gay: Pitch properties in the speech of gay and straight men. American Speech 69(1): 30–57. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hau, Chi-Kuk. 2007. A Study on Acoustic Characteristics of Cantonese Gay Speech and Perceived Sexual Orientation. (Unpublished) MA thesis, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Henton, Caroline G. 1989. Fact and fiction in the description of female and male pitch. Language & Communication 9(4): 299–311. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jackson, Peter A. 1998. Male homosexuality and transgenderism in the Thai Buddhist tradition. In Queer Dharma: Voices of Gay Buddhists, Winston Leyland (ed), 55–89. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2000. An explosion of Thai identities: Global queering and reimagining queer theory. Culture, Health and Sexuality 2(4): 405–424. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2001. Pre-gay, post-queer: Thai perspectives on proliferating gender/sex diversity in Asia. Journal of Homosexuality 40(3–4): 1–25. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2009. Global queering and global queer theory: Thai [trans]genders and [homo]sexualities in world history. Autrepart 1(49): 15–30. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jackson, Peter A. & Sullivan, Gerard. 1999. Lady Boys, Tom Boys, Rent Boys: Male and Female Homosexualities in Contemporary Thailand. New York: Hawarth Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jacobs, Greg, Smyth, Ron & Rogers, Henry. 2000. Language and sexuality: Searching for the phonetic correlates of gay- and straight-sounding male voices. Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics 18(1): 46–61.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kajino, Sakiko. 2010. Coexistence of contradictory meanings of a variable: Phrasal final lengthening in speech of a Japanese pop star Ayumi Hamasaki. (Paper presented at The New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV39) Conference, University of Texas, San Antonio).
Lambert, Wallace E., Hodgson, Robert Charles, Gardner, C. Robert & Fillenbaum, Samuel. 1960. Evaluational reactions to spoken languages. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 60(1): 44–51. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Levon, Erez. 2006. Hearing “gay”: Prosody, interpretation, and the affective judgments of men’s speech. American Speech 81(1): 56–78. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2007. Sexuality in context: Variation and the sociolinguistic perception of identity. Language in Society 36(4): 533–554. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Linville, Sue Ellen. 1998. Acoustic correlates of perceived versus actual sexual orientation in men’s speech. Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica 50(1): 35–48. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lowry, Orla. 2002. The stylistic variation of nuclear pattern in Belfast English. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 32(1): 33–42. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McElhinny, Bonnie. 2014. Theorizing gender in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology toward effective interventions in gender inequity. In The Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality, Susan Ehrlich, Miriam Meyerhoff & Janet Holmes (eds), 48–67. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mendoza-Denton, Norma. 1995. Pregnant pauses: Silence and authority in the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings. In Gender Articulated: Language and the Culturally Constructed Self, Kira Hall & Mary Bucholtz (eds), 51–66. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Munson, Benjamin. 2010. The influence of actual and perceived sexual orientation on diadochokinetic rate in women and men. In Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH 111: 1525–1528.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Piccolo, Fabiana. 2008. Perceived sexual orientation and attitudes towards sounding gay or straight. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 14(2): 130–138.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet B., Bent, Tessa, Munson, Benjamin, Bradlow, Ann R. & Bailey, J. Michael. 2004. The influence of sexual orientation on vowel production. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 116(4): 1905–1908. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rogers, Henry & Smyth, Ron. 2003. Phonetic differences between gay- and straight-sounding male speakers of North American English. (Paper presented at the 15th International Conference of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain)
Saisuwan, Pavadee. 2011. Kathoeys’ and Women’s Use of First-Person Personal Reference Terms in Thai. (Unpublished) MSc thesis, University of Edinburgh.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2016. Male Femininity in Thai Among Men who Identify with Non-Normative Male Roles. (Unpublished) PhD dissertation, Queen Mary University of London.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Scheffe, Henry. 1959. The Analysis of Variance. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Shapiro, Judith. 1981. Anthropology and the study of gender. Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 64(4): 446–465.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Smyth, Ron, Jacobs, Greg & Rogers, Henry. 2003. Male voices and perceived sexual orientation: An experimental and theoretical approach. Language in Society 32(3): 329–350. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stern, Chadly, West, Tessa V., Jost, John T. & Rule, Nicholas O. 2013. The politics of gaydar: Ideological differences in the use of gendered cues in categorizing sexual orientation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 104(3): 520–541. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Suchip, C. Panyanuphab. 1982. Phra Traipidok Samrap Prachachon [“The Tipitaka for the People”]. Bangkok: Mahamakut Ratchawitthayalai.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sulpizio, Simone, Fasoli, Fabio, Maass, Anne, Paladino, Maria Paola, Vespignani, Francesco, Eyssel, Friederike & Bentler, Dominik. 2015. The sound of voice: Voice-based categorization of speakers’ sexual orientation within and across languages. PLoS One 10(7). e0128882. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Valentova, Jaroslava Varella & Havliček, Jan. 2013. Perceived sexual orientation based on vocal and facial stimuli is linked to self-rated sexual orientation in Czech men. PLoS One 8(12): e82417. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Winter, Sam. 2006. Thai transgenders in focus: Their beliefs about attitudes towards and origins of transgender. International Journal of Transgenderism 9(2): 47–62. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (4)

Cited by four other publications

Vorberger, Lars
2024. „Das klingt echt schwul“ – Eine soziophonetische Untersuchung zum stereotypen schwulen Sprechen im Deutschen. Zeitschrift für Angewandte Linguistik 2024:80 ► pp. 136 ff. DOI logo
Jones, Lucy
2021. Queer linguistics and identity. Journal of Language and Sexuality 10:1 ► pp. 13 ff. DOI logo
Calder, Jeremy
2020. Language, gender and sexuality in 2019: interrogating normativities in the field. Gender and Language 14:4 ► pp. 429 ff. DOI logo
Daniele, Maddalena, Fabio Fasoli, Raquel Antonio, Simone Sulpizio & Anne Maass
2020. Gay Voice: Stable Marker of Sexual Orientation or Flexible Communication Device?. Archives of Sexual Behavior 49:7 ► pp. 2585 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 13 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue