While recent work in sociophonetics has focused on the speech of gay men (Gaudio 1994; Podesva 2007; Podesva, Roberts & Campbell-Kibler 2002), lesbian women (Camp 2009; Van Borsel Vandaele & Corthals 2013), and transgender people (Zimman 2017a), the speech styles of asexual individuals remain understudied. This study analyzes an
interview with a graysexual and homoromantic cisgender student at a research university in California, examining the segmental and
prosodic characteristics of three voices he uses to construct and position his graysexual identity: a questioning voice, a
judgmental voice, and a non-desiring voice. The analysis finds that the questioning voice is characterized by decreased speech
rate, high F0, and modal phonation; the judgmental voice, by low F0; and the non-desiring voice, by low F0, narrow F0 range, low
intensity, reduced gesture, flat facial expression, and a centralized vowel space. The results emphasize the importance of
stylistic reticence to the construction of graysexuality.
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Camp, Margaret. 2009. Japanese Lesbian Speech: Sexuality, Gender Identity, and Language. PhD dissertation, University of Arizona.
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Gaudio, Rudolf. 1994. Sounding gay: Pitch properties in the speech of gay and straight men. American Speech 69(1): 30–57.
Ginoza, Mary Kame & Miller, Tristan. 2014. The 2014 AVEN community census: Preliminary findings, 1–19. <[URL]> (March11, 2018)
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Levon, Erez. 2016. Conflicted selves: Language, religion and same-sex desire in Israel. In Language, Sexuality, and Power: Studies in Intersectional Sociolinguistics, Erez Levon & Ronald Beline Mendes (eds), 215–241. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Podesva, Robert. 2007. Phonation type as a stylistic variable: The use of falsetto in constructing a persona. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11(4): 478–504.
Podesva, Robert J., Roberts, Sarah J. & Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn. 2002. Sharing resources and indexing meanings in the production of gay styles. In Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice, Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Robert J. Podesva, Sarah J. Roberts & Andrew Wong (eds), 175–189. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Pratt, Teresa. 2018. Embodying toughness: LOT-raising, /l/ velarization, and retracted articulatory setting. (Paper presented at the 92nd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Salt Lake City, Utah)
Shiau, Hong-Chi. 2015. Lavender Mandarin in the sites of desire: Situating linguistic performances among Taiwanese gay men. Language & Communication 421: 1–10.
Thomas, Erik R. & Kendall, Tyler. 2007. NORM: The vowel normalization and plotting suite. <[URL]> (November19, 2018)
Trester, Anna Marie. 2009. Discourse marker ‘oh’ as a means for realizing the identity potential of constructed dialogue in interaction. Journal of Sociolinguistics 13(2): 147–168.
Van Borsel, John, Vandaele, Jana & Corthals, Paul. 2013. Pitch and pitch variation in lesbian women. Journal of Voice 27(5): 656.e13–656.e16.
Zimman, Lal. 2017a. Gender as stylistic bricolage: Transmasculine voices and the relationship between fundamental frequency and /s/. Language in Society 46(3): 339–370.
Zimman, Lal. 2017b. Operationalizing stance: Affective stance in a pervasively creaky transgender speaker. (Paper presented at the 91st Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Austin, Texas)
Cited by (5)
Cited by five other publications
Brown, Gwendolyn, Andreea Cheva, Megan Fraser & Robert J. Zeglin
2023. Asexuality: a content analysis of sex therapy journals. Psychology & Sexuality 14:1 ► pp. 17 ff.
2020. Marginalisierung in der Marginalität?. Zeitschrift für Angewandte Linguistik 2020:73 ► pp. 213 ff.
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