Walking the straight and narrow
linguistic choice and gendered presentation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v10i2.19812Keywords:
English, Gender, Variation, TranssexualAbstract
The social category of gender is often considered binary in linguistic research, but this division glosses over the myriad identities within the broad categories of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. It also ignores the gendered experiences of participants, particularly transsexuals, for whom language is an important social signal of identity. Two sociolinguistic variables (adjectival intensification and the phonetic production of [s]) are used to explore the linguistic construction of gender within a corpus of straight, queer and transsexual speakers in Ottawa, Canada. Both variables emerge as sites for social identity work, suggesting that speakers with the most to lose practice a kind of linguistic conservatism. Straight men, who run the risk of losing the enormous social capital associated with heteronormative masculinity, take pains to avoid sounding gay or effeminate. Transsexuals, who risk both emotional and physical repercussions should their gender identities be questioned, aim for a safer middle ground.
References
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Butler, J. (1988) Performative acts and gender constitution: an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. Theatre Journal 40(4): 519–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3207893
Cameron, D. (1997) Performing gender identity: young men’s talk and the construction of heterosexual masculinity. In S. Johnson and U. H. Meinhof (eds) Language and Masculinity 47–64. Oxford: Blackwell.
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Cameron, D. and Kulick, D. (2003) Language and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511791178
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Eckert, P. (1988) Adolescent social structure and the spread of linguistic change. Language in Society 17(2): 183–207. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500012756
Eckert, P. (1989) Jocks and Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in the High School. New York: Teachers College Press.
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Flipsen, P., Shriberg, L., Weismer, G., Karlsson, H. and McSweeny, J. (1999) Acoustic characteristics of /s/ in adolescents. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 42: 663–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/jslhr.4203.663
Freed, A. F. (2003) Epilogue: reflections on language and gender research. In Holmes and Meyerhoff (2003): 669–721.
Gaudio, R. (1994) Sounding gay: speech properties in the speech of gay and straight men. American Speech 69(1): 30–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/455948
Glass, L. (1992) He Says, She Says: Closing the Communication Gap between the Sexes. New York: Putnam.
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Ingemann, F. (1968) Identification of the speaker’s sex from voiceless fricatives. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 44(4): 1142–4. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.1911208
Ito, R. and Tagliamonte, S. (2003) Well weird, right dodgy, very strange, really cool: layering and recycling in English intensifiers. Language in Society 23 (2): 257–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047404503322055
Jespersen, O. (1922) Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin. London: George Allen & Unwin.
Jongman, A., Wayland, R. and Wong, S. (2000) Acoustic characteristics of English fricatives. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 108(3): 1252–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.1288413
Labov, W. ([1966]1982) The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Labov, W., Ash, S. and Boberg, C. (2006) The Atlas of North American English: A Multimedia Reference Tool. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Lakoff, R. (1973) Language and woman’s place. Language in Society 2: 45–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500000051
Lakoff, R. (1975) Language and Woman’s Place. New York: Harper & Row.
Lakoff, R. and Bucholtz, M. (2004) Language and Woman’s Place: Text and Commentaries. New York: Oxford University Press.
Levey, S. (2010) The Englishes of Canada. In A. Kirkpatrick (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes 113–31. London: Routledge.
Levon, E. (2007) Sexuality in context: variation and the sociolinguistic perception of identity. Language in Society 36: 533–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0047404507070431
Levon, E. (2011) Teasing apart to bring together: gender and sexuality in variationist research. American Speech 86(1): 69–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00031283-1277519
Milroy, L. (1980) Language and Social Networks. Baltimore, MD: University Parks Press.
Moonwoman-Baird, B. (1997) Toward a study of lesbian speech. In A. Livia and K. Hall (eds) Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality 202–13. New York: Oxford University Press.
Munson, B. (2007) The acoustic correlates of perceived masculinity, perceived femininity, and perceived sexual orientation. Language and Speech 50(1): 125–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/00238309070500010601
Munson, B., McDonald, E. C., DeBoe, N. L. and White, A. R. (2006) The acoustic and perceptual bases of judgments of women and men’s sexual orientation from read speech. Journal of Phonetics 34: 202–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2005.05.003
Partington, A. (1993) Corpus evidence of language change: the case of intensifiers. In M. Baker, G. Francis and E. Tognini-Bonelli (eds) Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair 177–92. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/z.64.12par
Peters, H. (1994) Degree adverbs in modern English. In D. Kastovsky (ed.) Studies in Early Modern English 269–88. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9783110879599.269
PFLAG (2015) A definition of ‘queer’. Retrieved 15 January 2015 from http://community.pflag.org/abouttheq.
Pharao, N., Maegaard, M., Møller, J. S. and Kristiansen, T. (2014) Indexical meanings of [s+] among Copenhagen youth: social perception of a phonetic variant in different prosodic contexts. Langauge in Society 43: 1–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0047404513000857
Podesva, R. J. and Kajino, S. (2014) Sociophonetics, gender, and sexuality. In S. Ehrlich, M. Meyerhoff and J. Holmes (eds) The Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality (2nd edn) 103–22. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9781118584248.ch5
PTS (2001) How well are we doing? A survey of the GLBT population in Ottawa. Retrieved 8 June 2011 from www.pinktriangle.org/wellness/main.html
Queen, R. (2004) ‘I am woman, here me roar’: the importance of linguistic stereotype for lesbian identity performances. In R. T. Lakoff and M. Bucholtz (eds) Language and Woman’s Place: Text and Commentaries 289–95. New York: Oxford University Press.
Schwartz, M. F. (1968) Indentification of speaker sex from isolated, voiceless fricatives. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 43(5): 1178–9. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.1910954
Smyth, R. and Rogers, H. (2002) Phonetics, gender, and sexual orientation. Actes de l’ACL/CLA Proceedings 2002: 299–311.
Smyth, R. and Rogers, H. (2008) Do gay-sounding men speak like women? Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics 27: 129–44.
Smyth, R., Jacobs, G. and Rogers, H. (2003) Male voices and perceived sexual orientation: an experimental and theoretical approach. Language in Society 32: 329–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0047404503323024
Stuart-Smith, J. (2007) Empirical evidence for gendered speech production: /s/ in Glaswegian. In J. Coates and J. Ignacio Hualde (eds) Laboratory Phonology 9 65–86. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Tagliamonte, S. (2008) So different and pretty cool! Recycling intensifiers in Toronto, Canada. English Language and Linguistics 12(2): 361–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1360674308002669
Tagliamonte, S. and Uscher, D. (2009) Queer youth in the speech community: enriching large scale studies of variation and change. Paper presented at NWAV 38, University of Ottawa, 22–25 October.
Tannen, D. (1991) You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. New York: Ballantine.
Thomas, E. (2011) Sociophonetics: An Introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Valenti, J. (2007) Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters. Emeryville, CA: Seal Press.
Ville de Gatineau (2011) A portrait of Gatineau. Retrieved on 19 January 2012 from www.gatineau.ca/servicesenligne/infoterritoire/profil_web/profil1_pres_en.html.
West, C. and Zimmerman, D. H. (1987) Doing gender. Gender and Society 1(2): 125–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0891243287001002002
Wilson, E. O. (1975) Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wolfram, W. (1969) Linguistic Correlates of Social Differences in the Negro Community. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Zimman, L. (2012). Transmasculinity & phonetic bricolage. Paper presented at Lanvender Languages and Linguistics 19, American University, Washington, DC, 9–12 February.
Boberg, C. (2008) Regional phonetic differentiation in Standard Canadian English. Journal of English Linguistics 36(2): 129–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0075424208316648
Boersma, P. and Weenink, D. (2012) Praat: doing phonetics by computer (version 5.3.08). Computer program. Retrieved 5 March 2012 from www.praat.org.
Brown, L. (2009) ‘Not just super gay men’: transwomen, vlogs, stereotypes, and the performance of gendered dialects. MA memoir, University of Toronto, Canada.
Brown, M. and Rounsley, C. A. (1996) True Selves: Understanding Transsexualism. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Bucholtz, M. and Hall, K. (2004) Theorizing identity in language and sexuality research. Language in Society 33: 469–515. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0047404504334020
Bucholtz, M. and Hall, K. (2005) Identity and interaction: a sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies 7(4–5): 585–614. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1461445605054407
Burke, P. (1996) Gender Shock: Exploding the Myths of Male and Female. New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday.
Butler, J. (1988) Performative acts and gender constitution: an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. Theatre Journal 40(4): 519–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3207893
Cameron, D. (1997) Performing gender identity: young men’s talk and the construction of heterosexual masculinity. In S. Johnson and U. H. Meinhof (eds) Language and Masculinity 47–64. Oxford: Blackwell.
Cameron, D. (2003) Gender and language ideologies. In Holmes and Meyerhoff (2003): 447–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9780470756942.ch19
Cameron, D. and Kulick, D. (2003) Language and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511791178
City of Ottawa (2006) Ottawa counts. Retrieved 8 June 2011 from www.ottawa.ca/city_services/statistics/counts/index_en.shtml.
Crenshaw, K. (1989) Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989: 139–68.
Eckert, P. (1988) Adolescent social structure and the spread of linguistic change. Language in Society 17(2): 183–207. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500012756
Eckert, P. (1989) Jocks and Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in the High School. New York: Teachers College Press.
Epstein, C. F. (2007) Great divides: the cultural, cognitive, and social bases of the global subordination of women. American Sociological Review 72(1): 1–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/000312240707200101
Evans, S., Neave, N., Wakelin, D. and Hamilton, C. (2008) The relationship between testosterone and vocal frequencies in human males. Physiology and Behaviour 93: 783–8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2007.11.033
Flipsen, P., Shriberg, L., Weismer, G., Karlsson, H. and McSweeny, J. (1999) Acoustic characteristics of /s/ in adolescents. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 42: 663–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/jslhr.4203.663
Freed, A. F. (2003) Epilogue: reflections on language and gender research. In Holmes and Meyerhoff (2003): 669–721.
Gaudio, R. (1994) Sounding gay: speech properties in the speech of gay and straight men. American Speech 69(1): 30–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/455948
Glass, L. (1992) He Says, She Says: Closing the Communication Gap between the Sexes. New York: Putnam.
Gray, J. (1992) Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. New York: HarperCollins.
Hazenberg, E. (2012) Language and identity practice: a sociolinguistic study of gender in Ottawa, Ontario. MA thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada.
Heffernan, K. (2004) Evidence from HNR that /s/ is a social marker of gender. Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics 23(2): 71–84.
Holmes, J. and Meyerhoff, M. (eds) (2003) The Handbook of Language and Gender. Malden, MA: Blackwell. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9780470756942
Howells, W. D. (1906) Our daily speech. Harper’s Bazaar 40: 930–34.
Ingemann, F. (1968) Identification of the speaker’s sex from voiceless fricatives. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 44(4): 1142–4. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.1911208
Ito, R. and Tagliamonte, S. (2003) Well weird, right dodgy, very strange, really cool: layering and recycling in English intensifiers. Language in Society 23 (2): 257–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047404503322055
Jespersen, O. (1922) Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin. London: George Allen & Unwin.
Jongman, A., Wayland, R. and Wong, S. (2000) Acoustic characteristics of English fricatives. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 108(3): 1252–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.1288413
Labov, W. ([1966]1982) The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Labov, W., Ash, S. and Boberg, C. (2006) The Atlas of North American English: A Multimedia Reference Tool. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Lakoff, R. (1973) Language and woman’s place. Language in Society 2: 45–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500000051
Lakoff, R. (1975) Language and Woman’s Place. New York: Harper & Row.
Lakoff, R. and Bucholtz, M. (2004) Language and Woman’s Place: Text and Commentaries. New York: Oxford University Press.
Levey, S. (2010) The Englishes of Canada. In A. Kirkpatrick (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes 113–31. London: Routledge.
Levon, E. (2007) Sexuality in context: variation and the sociolinguistic perception of identity. Language in Society 36: 533–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0047404507070431
Levon, E. (2011) Teasing apart to bring together: gender and sexuality in variationist research. American Speech 86(1): 69–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00031283-1277519
Milroy, L. (1980) Language and Social Networks. Baltimore, MD: University Parks Press.
Moonwoman-Baird, B. (1997) Toward a study of lesbian speech. In A. Livia and K. Hall (eds) Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality 202–13. New York: Oxford University Press.
Munson, B. (2007) The acoustic correlates of perceived masculinity, perceived femininity, and perceived sexual orientation. Language and Speech 50(1): 125–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/00238309070500010601
Munson, B., McDonald, E. C., DeBoe, N. L. and White, A. R. (2006) The acoustic and perceptual bases of judgments of women and men’s sexual orientation from read speech. Journal of Phonetics 34: 202–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2005.05.003
Partington, A. (1993) Corpus evidence of language change: the case of intensifiers. In M. Baker, G. Francis and E. Tognini-Bonelli (eds) Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair 177–92. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/z.64.12par
Peters, H. (1994) Degree adverbs in modern English. In D. Kastovsky (ed.) Studies in Early Modern English 269–88. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9783110879599.269
PFLAG (2015) A definition of ‘queer’. Retrieved 15 January 2015 from http://community.pflag.org/abouttheq.
Pharao, N., Maegaard, M., Møller, J. S. and Kristiansen, T. (2014) Indexical meanings of [s+] among Copenhagen youth: social perception of a phonetic variant in different prosodic contexts. Langauge in Society 43: 1–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0047404513000857
Podesva, R. J. and Kajino, S. (2014) Sociophonetics, gender, and sexuality. In S. Ehrlich, M. Meyerhoff and J. Holmes (eds) The Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality (2nd edn) 103–22. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9781118584248.ch5
PTS (2001) How well are we doing? A survey of the GLBT population in Ottawa. Retrieved 8 June 2011 from www.pinktriangle.org/wellness/main.html
Queen, R. (2004) ‘I am woman, here me roar’: the importance of linguistic stereotype for lesbian identity performances. In R. T. Lakoff and M. Bucholtz (eds) Language and Woman’s Place: Text and Commentaries 289–95. New York: Oxford University Press.
Schwartz, M. F. (1968) Indentification of speaker sex from isolated, voiceless fricatives. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 43(5): 1178–9. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.1910954
Smyth, R. and Rogers, H. (2002) Phonetics, gender, and sexual orientation. Actes de l’ACL/CLA Proceedings 2002: 299–311.
Smyth, R. and Rogers, H. (2008) Do gay-sounding men speak like women? Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics 27: 129–44.
Smyth, R., Jacobs, G. and Rogers, H. (2003) Male voices and perceived sexual orientation: an experimental and theoretical approach. Language in Society 32: 329–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0047404503323024
Stuart-Smith, J. (2007) Empirical evidence for gendered speech production: /s/ in Glaswegian. In J. Coates and J. Ignacio Hualde (eds) Laboratory Phonology 9 65–86. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Tagliamonte, S. (2008) So different and pretty cool! Recycling intensifiers in Toronto, Canada. English Language and Linguistics 12(2): 361–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1360674308002669
Tagliamonte, S. and Uscher, D. (2009) Queer youth in the speech community: enriching large scale studies of variation and change. Paper presented at NWAV 38, University of Ottawa, 22–25 October.
Tannen, D. (1991) You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. New York: Ballantine.
Thomas, E. (2011) Sociophonetics: An Introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Valenti, J. (2007) Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters. Emeryville, CA: Seal Press.
Ville de Gatineau (2011) A portrait of Gatineau. Retrieved on 19 January 2012 from www.gatineau.ca/servicesenligne/infoterritoire/profil_web/profil1_pres_en.html.
West, C. and Zimmerman, D. H. (1987) Doing gender. Gender and Society 1(2): 125–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0891243287001002002
Wilson, E. O. (1975) Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wolfram, W. (1969) Linguistic Correlates of Social Differences in the Negro Community. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Zimman, L. (2012). Transmasculinity & phonetic bricolage. Paper presented at Lanvender Languages and Linguistics 19, American University, Washington, DC, 9–12 February.
Published
2016-07-15
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Hazenberg, E. (2016). Walking the straight and narrow: linguistic choice and gendered presentation. Gender and Language, 10(2), 270-294. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v10i2.19812
