Welcome

Marlen — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 14:39:20 +0000

The past two decades have witnessed a diversity of research aimed at examining the production, perceptions, and interpretations of men’s speech in an attempt to examine what listeners attune to when making judgments about the masculinity or sexuality of the speaker (for example, Crist, 1997; Gaudio, 1994; Gowen & Britt, 2006; Jacobs, 1996; Levon, 2006; Smyth, Jacobs & Rogers, 2003). Responses to such research include criticism of methodological approaches as well as the recognition that such linguistic styles may be reflective of socially contextual identities rather than one’s sexual or gender identity, specifically. Moreover, the majority of research has focused on listener perceptions of random voices and fails to examine the lived experiences of men and their affective responses to marginalization as a result of their stylized speech. This chapter reviews the recent literature in linguistic and applied linguistic research with men’s voices and explores four individual’s narratives (a gay male, a straight male, a male to female transexual, and a female to male transexual) about the sounds of their voices in order to gain phenomenological, qualitative data about the significance of human voice to identity development across varying gender and sexual identities and across the lifespan.

Research plan: Authors will write brief narratives exploring the significance of their voices in relation to their own gender and sexual identity development. The purpose is to introduce readers to the marginalization that may occur surrounding speech production and its implications for understanding masculinity. By examining how masculinity (and consequently, femininity) are problematized in personal narratives, operational definitions of masculinity can be constructed.

The Sound of My Voice

Welcome