Having considered some of the main sociophonetic features researched in language and sexuality research, this section will focus more specifically on gay female speakers. While gay male speakers have dominated research on language and sexuality, there has also been a significant amount of research on gay female speakers. However, it is important to note that when looking closely at a narrow demographic of speakers, one runs the risk of overgeneralizing or implying that all speakers in that group use certain features or strategies. The research summarized below, as well as the thesis as a whole, do not attempt to say how all gay women globally speak, but instead confines their conclusions to a narrow scope of speakers that have taken part in sociolinguistic research.
As Queen (1998) and Jones (2018) both note, there are certain strategies that have been seen repeatedly in the research on lesbians in sociolinguistics. These
similarities amongst speakers have been seen primarily in discourse analysis and will be discussed further below, as discourse and conversational analysis have been one of the primary fields of linguistics to research lesbian speakers. The focus then turns to the sociophonetic research that has included lesbian speakers, as this thesis adopts a sociophonetic approach. Finally, I will demonstrate where the research falls short when attempting to understand gay speakers and aim to show how this current thesis addresses some of these gaps.
2.6.1 Discourse Analysis
There has been a great deal of research that uses discourse analysis in order to understand how female speakers may index their identity within specific
conversations and certain contexts. Jones (2018) outlines some of the key initial work on gay speech, which started in the 1980s. All of these initial studies use discourse or conversational analysis to look closely at how self-identified gay speakers may use language in such a way as to index their sexual orientation. Jones demonstrates that many of the studies of how gay women may index their sexual orientation demonstrate stances the speakers take to show their membership of a gay
community. These stances may include the speakers mutually agreeing that homophobia is a problem and sharing their knowledge of LGBTQ history, as in Queen (1998), or the use of humour and teasing around hegemonic female norms, as in Bland (1996, as cited in Jones 2018)
Discourse analysis continues to be one of the common fields of linguistics that researches how female sexuality is expressed. Sauntson and Morrish (2012) undertook a close analysis of a conversation between a university football team whose members identify as both gay and straight. In this conversation the young women frequently talk about sexual orientation and their understanding of how to identify or display sexual orientation. The authors write that this conversation demonstrates how fluidly the speakers view sexual orientation and how they use things like humour to undermine staunch norms.
Shrikant (2014) also uses discourse analysis, and in particular membership
categorisation analysis, to demonstrate how a group of speakers index their sexual orientation. Seals (2016) also uses discourse analysis to look at the humour used by a gay female comedian and how she interacts with her audience. While these recent studies are not an exhaustive list of the on-going discourse analysis research in connection to female sexuality, they demonstrate the frequency of discourse analysis within this field of research.
2.6.2 Sociophonetic Research
There has been less sociophonetic research on gay female speakers than there has been with gay male speakers. This may be due, in part, to the fact that there are far fewer stereotypes of lesbian speech than there are of gay male speech. As discussed above there are many references in popular culture to a “gay lisp” or a “gay voice” and it is even prominent enough that entire documentary titled Do I Sound Gay (Thorpe, 2014) discussing the topic of a gay male voice was released. However, there is not a similar phenomenon with gay female speakers and there are rarely distinct features that are identified as being particularly “lesbian”. Therefore, there are not as many studies that consider specific features of gay female speech. The
following section will revisit the few studies that do consider lesbian speech and consider the overall patterns they may show.
As the studies of F0 and pitch were discussed above in Section 2.5.1, I will not go into great detail about the following research. Instead I will highlight the key findings to then examine patterns later. Moonwomon-Baird (1997) published initial findings of female gay speech and F0 range. Waksler (2001) later developed this F0 range research with her study in San Francisco, California.
Following Waksler’s study was an even larger-scale study conducted by Van Borsel, Vandaele, and Corthals (2013). In their study of Dutch speakers, 102 participants were recorded – 34 lesbian speakers and 68 straight speakers. They found that the lesbian speakers had a significantly lower mean fundamental frequency than the straight speakers and that the lesbian speakers had a significantly lower pitch range than the straight speakers. The researchers do acknowledge that the lesbian
participants were much more likely to be smokers than the straight participants and wonder if this potentially influenced the results.
One final fundamental frequency to consider is that of Queen (2006) who looked at the characters on the popular US television show Ellen. In her research, Queen found that the lesbian characters had a lower average pitch than the heterosexual characters. While it is difficult to understand how natural this may be or how much was influenced by portraying a character broadcast to a large audience, it may be significant in how people expect lesbians to sound – or at least people who watched Ellen.
As highlighted above, the other vocal features commonly studied not only in language and sexuality research, but with female gay speakers specifically, are fricatives. As all the studies that considered gay speakers were discussed at length in Section 2.5.2 above, I will not go into exhaustive detail again here. However, it will be helpful to highlight the key findings from these studies.
Munson, Jefferson, and McDonald (2006) considered the continuum of /s/ to /ʃ/ and found that women who were identified as being lesbian or bisexual by participants
were more likely to be perceived as using /s/ instead of /ʃ/ and the productions of fricatives by lesbian and bisexual women had lower centres of gravity than those produced by straight women. Podesva and Van Hofwegen (2016) found similar centre of gravity results in their study of urban and rural speakers in Northern California. In their study, the lesbian speakers had significantly lower centre of gravity measurements than both the rural and urban straight female speakers.
Finally, Saigusa (2016) found that the openly lesbian actress Jane Lynch had a lower centre of gravity of /s/ when talking to another openly lesbian journalist than when she spoke with non-lesbian news anchors. Lynch also uses a lower /s/ when discussing LGBTQ topics with the non-lesbian news anchors. These results imply that /s/ may be used to index some level of lesbian identity or a queer identity more broadly.
Studies of fundamental frequency and fricatives show that there is a need for further research in this field. The findings tend to be inconsistent and for some studies the participant pool is quite low. The following section highlights how this current thesis hopes to address some of the gaps in the previous research.
2.6.3 Current Research
As seen by the outline of the research above, there are still many gaps within the research of gay female speech. The work cited above and much of the research on gay female speakers to this point has focused on cis-gendered, white, middle class English speakers either from the United States or Western Europe. While this trend tends to be the norm throughout much linguistic research, there has been a push to be more inclusive and move beyond such a narrow group of participants.
This thesis has worked towards a level of diversity by taking social class into
consideration and working with both middle-class and working-class speakers in the UK. Due to the recentness of the work and the age of the participants, the current group of speakers is also of a different generation than those in much of the previous work cited above. As Jones acknowledges, “there is a need, therefore, to consider the impact of current discourses on younger women’s identity construction” (Jones, 2018, p. 13). Most of the participants in this thesis are younger than those recruited
for the previous studies and therefore may view sexuality differently from the previous generations, which will add to the continued body of work.
While the participants in this study are still part of the disproportionally large body of work that focuses on Western, white, cis-gendered women, there has been an attempt to broaden who is considered when researching gay female speakers and to include people who have not yet been included. It is hoped that this thesis will add to the body of knowledge that has already been developed, that it will also help to encourage further research on more diverse lesbian speakers and can be used as a starting point for research in the future.