ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the history of perceptual work in language, gender, and sexuality, noting particularly the points at which key concepts revolutionised the field as well as enduring themes which have recurred throughout. Perceptual work in gender and sexuality has been dominated by the perception of men’s masculinity and sexual orientation, with subfields focusing on accuracy (how do perceptions map to speakers’ own self-identifications, particularly of sexual orientation) and acoustic features (which features influence judgements, independent of speaker identity).Other threads have included perceptions of transwomen’s speech and to a lesser extent transmen’s, and small literatures on perceptions of women’s sexual orientation and feminist identity.
This tradition has primarily explored connections between speech performances and perceptions of individual social qualities. We will discuss a small study aimed at better understanding the role of personae or characters in the linguistic perception of masculinity, based on recordings of young men reading short sentences in a manner they considered ‘as masculine as possible’. Self-reports from this task suggested that many, even most, speakers drew on characterological tropes or archetypes in their performance. We ask whether listeners show evidence of likewise drawing on bundled characters in understanding the stylised performances.
