Cover not available

Article published In: Journal of Language and Sexuality
Vol. 4:1 (2015) ► pp.30–76

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

Sounding gay and sounding straight

The performance of male sexual identity in Italian

 | University of California, Davis, USA
Published online: 30 March 2015
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.4.1.02rus
This paper presents a performance-based approach to the study of the phonetic encoding of sexual identity in Italian. Six male speakers were recruited after being controlled for familiarity, interaction, and comfort with members of both hetero- and homosexual communities. They were recorded reading introductory, scientific, and narrative paragraphs with the goals of conveying straight and gay identities, respectively, as well as in an unmarked style. Analysis focused on segmental (vowels, /s/, liquids), suprasegmental, and pragmatic components of performances, the results of which suggest that speakers use a combination of phonetic features to instantiate socially salient identities.
References (38)
Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and Social Relations. New York: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Barrett, Rusty. 1998. Markedness and style shifting in performances by African American drag queens. In Codes and Consequences: Choosing Linguistic Variables, Carol Myers-Scotton (ed), 139–161. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bell, Allan. 1984. Language style as audience design. Language in Society 13(2): 145–204. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2001. Back in style: Reworking audience design. In Style and Sociolinguistic Variation, Penelope Eckert & John Rickford (eds), 139–169. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cameron, Deborah & Kulick, Don. 2003. Language and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Coupland, Nikolas. 2001. Language, situation, and the relational self: Theorizing dialect-style in sociolinguistics. In Style and Sociolinguistic Variation, Penelope Eckert & John R. Rickford (eds), 185–210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2007. Style: Language Variation and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Crisafulli, Edoardo. 1995. Linguagia e identità omosessuale. La Rivista della Lingue 4(18): 9–10.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Crist, Sean. 1997. Duration of onset consonants in gay male stereotyped speech. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 4(3): 53–70.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dardano, Maurizio & Trifone, Pietro. 1995. Grammatica Italiana, con Nozione di Linguistica (3rd edition). Bologna: Zanichelli.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope. 2008. Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4): 453–476. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope & Podesva, Robert J. 2011. Sociophonetics and sexuality: Toward a symbiosis of sociolinguistics and laboratory phonology. American Speech 86(1): 6–13. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Foulkes, Paul & Docherty, Gerard. 2006. The social life of phonetics and phonology. Journal of Phonetics 341: 409–438. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Foulkes, Paul. 2010. Exploring social-indexical knowledge: A long past but a short history. Journal of Laboratory Phonology 11: 5–39.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
Guzik, Karita M. 2006. Acoustic analysis of phonetic parameters of less masculine sounding German speech. Arbeitsberichte des Instituts für Phonetik und digitale Sprachverarbeitung Universität Kiel 361: 15–29.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hayes, Joseph J. 1981. Gayspeak. In Gayspeak: Gay Male and Lesbian Communication, James W. Chesebro (ed), 45–57. New York: Pilgrim Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Krämer, Martin. 2009. The Phonology of Italian. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kulick, Don. 2000. Gay and lesbian language. Annual Review of Anthropology 291: 243–285. 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
Lindblom, Bjorn. 1990. Explaining phonetic variation: A sketch of the H&H theory. In Speech Production and Speech Modelling, William J. Hardcastle & Alain Marchal (eds), 403–439. Dordrecht: Kluwer. 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 501: 35–48. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mack, Sara. 2010. A sociophonetic analysis of perception of sexual orientation in Puerto Rican Spanish. Laboratory Phonology 1(1): 41–63. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mack, Sara & Munson, Benjamin. 2012. The influence of /s/ quality on ratings of men’s sexual orientation: Explicit and implicit measures of the ‘gay lisp’ stereotype. Journal of Phonetics 401: 198–212. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McConnell-Ginet, Sally. 2011. Gender, Sexuality, and Meaning: Language Practice and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Munson, Benjamin & Babel, Molly. 2007. Loose lips and silver tongues, or, projecting sexual orientation through speech. Languages and Linguistics Compass 1(5): 416–449. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Munson, Benjamin, Jefferson, Sarah V. & McDonald, Elizabeth C. 2006a. The influence of perceived sexual orientation on fricative identification. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 119(4): 2427–2437. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Munson, Benjamin, McDonald, Elizabeth C., DeBoe, Nancy L. & White, Aubrey R. 2006b. The acoustic and perceptual bases of judgments of women and men’s sexual orientation from read speech. Journal of Phonetics 341: 202–240. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pettigrew, Thomas F. 1979. The ultimate attribution error: Extending Allport’s cognitive analysis of prejudice. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 51: 461–476. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pharao, Nicolai, Maegaard, Marie, Spindler Møller, Janus & Kristiansen, Tore. 2014. Indexical meanings of [s+] among Copenhagen youth: Social perception of a phonetic variant in different prosodic contexts. Language in Society 431: 1–31. 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
Podesva, Robert J. 2011a. The California vowel shift and gay identity. American Speech 86(1): 32–51. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2011b. Salience and the social meaning of declarative contours: Three case studies of gay professionals. Journal of English Linguistics 391: 233–264. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ranzato, Irene. 2012. Gayspeak and gay subjects in audiovisual translation: Strategies in Italian dubbing. Meta 57(2): 369–384. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schilling-Estes, Natalie. 1998. Investigating “self-conscious” speech: The performance register in Ocracoke English. Language in Society 271: 53–83. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sisson, Carol. 2003. Phonetic cues in the evaluation of gay male speech in Canadian English and Québec French (Unpublished manuscript).
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
Zwicky, Arnold M. 1997. Two lavender issues for linguists. In Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality, Anna Livia & Kira Hall (eds), 21–34. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (5)

Cited by five 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
Geng, Puyang & Wentao Gu
2022. Acoustic and Perceptual Characteristics of Mandarin Speech in Gay and Heterosexual Male Speakers. Language and Speech 65:4 ► pp. 1096 ff. DOI logo
Jones, Lucy
2021. Queer linguistics and identity. Journal of Language and Sexuality 10:1 ► pp. 13 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
Russell, Eric Louis
2017. Style shifting and the phonetic performance of gay vs. straight. Journal of Language and Sexuality 6:1 ► pp. 128 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