Research on listener identification of sexual orientation (e.g., Gaudio 1994, Piccolo 2008) has produced conflicting results. I argue that one contributing factor to linguistic perception of sexual orientation is the speaker’s assumptions about gay male ways of speaking American English or about specific linguistic features that the speaker believes listeners will associate with “sounding gay” in American English. Interviews I conducted with eight gay men highlight the ways in which positive and negative attitudes become realized in discourse about sounding gay or gay male ways of speaking and its link to other social practices. I then present results from a language perception study, which suggest that negative attitudes toward sounding gay decrease the possibility that a speaker will use linguistic features associated with sounding gay and will, as a result, be less likely to be perceived as gay than gay men who hold positive attitudes toward sounding gay.
2020. Gay Voice: Stable Marker of Sexual Orientation or Flexible Communication Device?. Archives of Sexual Behavior 49:7 ► pp. 2585 ff.
Fasoli, Fabio & Magdalena Formanowicz
2024. Can agentic messages help? Linguistic strategies to counteract voice‐based sexual orientation discrimination. British Journal of Social Psychology
Fasoli, Fabio, Peter Hegarty & David M. Frost
2021. Stigmatization of ‘gay‐sounding’ voices: The role of heterosexual, lesbian, and gay individuals’ essentialist beliefs. British Journal of Social Psychology 60:3 ► pp. 826 ff.
Fasoli, Fabio, Peter Hegarty, Anne Maass & Raquel Antonio
2018. Who wants to sound straight? Sexual majority and minority stereotypes, beliefs and desires about auditory gaydar. Personality and Individual Differences 130 ► pp. 59 ff.
Fasoli, Fabio, Peter Hegarty, Shannon O’Rourke & David M. Frost
2024. Understanding auditory gaydar experiences of lesbian women and gay men. Psychology & Sexuality► pp. 1 ff.
2015. Queer Linguistics as Critical Discourse Analysis. In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ► pp. 661 ff.
Levon, Erez
2014. Categories, stereotypes, and the linguistic perception of sexuality. Language in Society 43:5 ► pp. 539 ff.
Levon, Erez
2015. Integrating Intersectionality in Language, Gender, and Sexuality Research. Language and Linguistics Compass 9:7 ► pp. 295 ff.
Miller, Arianne E.
2018. Searching for gaydar: Blind spots in the study of sexual orientation perception. Psychology & Sexuality 9:3 ► pp. 188 ff.
Weirich, Melanie, Adrian P. Simpson & Simone Sulpizio
2018. Gender identity is indexed and perceived in speech. PLOS ONE 13:12 ► pp. e0209226 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 2 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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