SOCIOPHONETICS and SEXUALITY: Toward a Symbiosis of Sociolinguistics and Laboratory Phonology

SOCIOPHONETICS AND SEXUALITY: toward a symbiosis of sociolinguistics and laboratory Phonology

penelope eckert robert j. podesva Stanford University Georgetown University

In recent years, interest in variation has grown well beyond sociolinguistics, with benefits on all sides. The field of sociophonetics now brings together communities of people asking quite different questions about phonetic and phonological variation, as laboratory phoneticians and sociolinguists bring distinct theoretical and methodological expertise and concerns to the table. This special issue is based on a panel on sociolinguistic variation and sexuality organized by the Committee on the Status of Women in Linguistics at the 2010 annual meeting of the Linguistics Society of American (LSA). The purpose of the panel was to speed up the emerging collaboration among researchers from phonetics and from sociolinguistics who are working on issues of sexuality, as well as to inform the LSA membership of important issues raised in the study of sexuality. Particularly important in this enterprise is bringing together the more complex models of social variation that have been developed in recent years in the study of sociolinguistic variation with the phonetic and experimental advances of laboratory phonetics. To the extent that researchers are squarely planted in their own subdisciplines, each tends to use fairly two-dimensional representations of the other. The ubiquitous F1-F2 vowel plot that dominates work in sociolinguistics gets at a very small dimension of the phonetic signals that even individual vowels bring to the stylistic table. Similarly, two-dimensional categories such as male or female, gay or straight, offer very blunt social-analytical instruments. This may caricature the work done in this field, but we do so in order to emphasize the importance of bringing together the richness of phonetic and social analysis in any sociophonetic study. Experimental studies of speech perception and field studies of production provide important complementary methods and can be most productively done iteratively and in close consultation. As a long-term goal, we seek to bring together theoretical developments in social constructionist approaches to sexuality; advances in the development of cognitive models that incorporate both linguistic and social information; and methodologi-

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cal rigor from social and experimental perspectives. We offer the following observations and the articles in this volume as a move in this direction.

the problem of categories

Work on variation and sexuality emerged in the course of the study of language and gender, not because they are the same but because they offer similar challenges to the traditional way of studying variation. Speakers do not simply belong to gender and sexual categories—gender and sexuality do not constitute independent variables that one can combine unproblem- atically with class and ethnicity to explain linguistic behavior. As studies in language and gender have made amply clear, the differences among women and among men are greater than those between the two gender groups as a whole. And the meaning of gender is to be found not so much in an opposition between male and female, as in the range of ways of being male or being female. Similarly, if the study of sexuality is based on the categories created by the dominant ideological opposition of hetero- and homosexual categories, not only is it likely to yield very little in the way of correlations, it will completely miss the richness of linguistic activity that sexual diversity actually offers up. The articles in this issue offer several challenges to conceiving of sexuality in categorical terms. Robert Podesva argues that the character traits conventionally linked to California vowel features (e.g., “laid-back,” “fun”) can be used to construct particular gay personae (e.g., “partier”) that display similar characteristics, rather than any all-encompassing variety of gayness. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler uses perceptual methods to ascertain the relative contributions of multiple linguistic features to percepts of gay male identity. She demonstrates that while some features are sufficiently salient to index gayness on their own, others work in conjunction to index more specific ideological constructs (e.g., “smart, effeminate gay man”). And in his exami- nation of pitch patterns in the speech of two politically divergent groups of Israeli lesbians, Erez Levon asserts that even though the two groups exhibit similar phonetic behavior, their patterns arise for different reasons. In all three studies, unified categories like gay and lesbian are inadequate for explaining the range of phonetic variation observed. A focus on categories may lead us to another pitfall—conceiving of sexuality in terms of symmetrical oppositions. Once a category (e.g., “gay”) has been named, the Saussurean search for contrast leads us straight to the categories it opposes (e.g., “straight” or “lesbian”). Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with a focus on contrast; the danger lies in the assumption

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of symmetry. As Deborah Cameron points out in her commentary on the articles, we cannot assume that lesbian identities can be linguistically con- structed in ways that resemble the ways that gay identities are. Cameron argues that gay men can orient to essentialist linguistic stereotypes, while lesbians have no such analog. Crucial to this asymmetry is the notion of markedness. Attending to markedness enables the analyst to see how power plays out in the linguistic construction of sexuality. We need to rethink the social markedness that we impose on speakers who are not white, middle class, male, and heterosexual. The study of African American Vernacular English has only relatively recently led to the study of the linguistic construction of whiteness (Trechter and Bucholtz 2001), and a comparable delay was evident in the field of language and gender before scholars began to seriously consider the linguistic construction of masculinity (Johnson and Meinhof 1997). A similar lag should not occur in the study of sexuality because it is particularly clear that sounding heterosexual involves as much work as sounding gay. As Penelope Eckert discusses in her article, preadolescent girls enter the heterosexual market by participating in social engineering—by creating, dissolving, and talking about romantic partnerships. One leader in this endeavor at a northern California school produced significantly more fronted variants of /ow/ (a local sound change) in the quotative go when telling narratives about the group’s social dynamics, illustrating that local vowel features can be used to performatively construct heterosexuality. Our point here is not that categories should be avoided, since the quan- titative variationist enterprise centers on the identification and explanation of correlations between social categories and linguistic practice. Rather, we suggest first that categories be ethnographically significant and second that they be viewed as products of, rather than explanations for, variation patterns. As for the former recommendation, categories like “gay” and “straight” should be treated as predictors of linguistic use only insofar as they capture a relevant dimension of social differentiation among the speakers studied. This point is also important from the perspective of perception tests. As Benjamin Munson points out in his article, even widely used scales of “sounds gay” to “sounds heterosexual” lack ethnographic validity in some contexts. Regarding the latter recommendation, we emphasize the importance of explaining what correlations between linguistic patterns and social categories mean. While it is an accomplishment to identify phonetic features that, for example, distin- guish a group of gay-sounding men from a group of straight-sounding men, it is equally important to explain why the pattern arises. Doing so requires us to tackle the complexity of social indexicality.

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social meaning and indexicality

Understanding the nature of the relationship between linguistic features and the dimensions of the social world they evoke is one of the most important issues in the study of language and sexuality. Fortunately, searching for “the gay variable” is clearly a thing of the past. As Cameron points out, the articles in this issue have for the most part followed the lead of language and gender scholars (Ochs 1992) in not treating variables as direct indexes of sexuality. Instead, phonetic features index a host of stances, acts, and activities that are conventionally associated with sexual identities. While some linguistic resources may acquire a clear relation to a social category, most variables have indeterminate meanings (Silverstein 2003; Eckert 2008; Jaffe 2009), which are vivified, disambiguated, or created in the context of styles. For example, Campbell-Kibler shows that even though fronted variants of /s/ quite strongly cue percepts of gayness, the social meaning of (ING) is highly dependent on the other features packaged with it. As Levon claims, high pitch can, like (ING), serve distinct functions depending on contextual factors. He argues that among mainstream lesbians the use of high pitch when talking about gay topics indexes femininity, which is consonant with their identities as first and foremost women. Radical lesbians exhibit the same pitch pattern, which according to Levon cannot be understood to index femininity because radical lesbians reject the “hyperfemininity” to which mainstream lesbians orient. Variables can furthermore serve many social functions at once; what may be correlated with class may correlate also with gender, formality, mood, situation, and so on. As Munson notes, percepts of gay identity are strongly correlated with various other socially relevant factors, like height and perceived clarity. And this reflects the fact that in actual practice speakers use variation to construct personae that in turn people, or constitute, these broader categories. For example, the “Sassy Gay Friend” persona that Campbell-Kibler refers to and the “partier” persona discussed in Podesva’s article collectively constitute a small component of a broader gay identity. The same “partier” persona and the drama queen identity Eckert describes, together, define a small range of ways to be Californian.P rivileg- ing any one category, such as sexual preference or region of origin, then, short-circuits the analysis. One of the most privileged dimensions of social variation in sociolinguistics is geographic region, as sociolinguistic variation is at its base a dia- lectological enterprise. While dialectologists associate regional dialects with geography, components of any dialect are used in constructing stances and meanings that are not in themselves regional, a point discussed at length in a recent issue of American Speech (84.2 [Summer 2009]) on enregisterment

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(section editor, Kathryn Remlinger). Examining the role of regional accents in constructing sexual identity expands yet again the range of semiotic values regional variables can have. As Eckert and Podesva argue in their articles, California vowel features can index “flamboyant” and “fun” meanings, which can in turn be constitutive of adolescent heterosexuality and a variety of gay male identity, respectively. While we caution against treating geographic region as the sole, or even primary, index of regional variants, we emphasize the importance of grounding sociophonetic analyses of vowels in the regional varieties that constrain their behavior. If sociolinguists are guilty of paying too much attention to geography, laboratory phonologists might be said not to pay enough. Although phoneticians often treat phonological categories as independent of dialect and social geography, phonetic and phonological patterns are often constrained and stratified by social factors, as catalogued in detail in Foulkes (2010). Thus, the use of particular variables in the study of sexuality must be squarely located in dialect space and in the broader patterns of social variability in that space.

PUSHING THE PHONETIC ENVELOPE

The study of variation and sexuality has advantageously led researchers to move well beyond the regional variables that constitute the main bread and butter of variation studies. Interest in gender and sexuality has opened up work on nonsegmental variation—an area that has been more thoroughly studied in the phonetics community. The focus of most current variation studies on vowels can only be the beginning of our understanding of variation, for even vowels do not just move through an abstract two dimensional space, but combine with voice quality, duration, and other resources (Di Paolo and Faber 1990; Labov and Baranowski 2006). This special issue examines an impressive range of phonetic features (and acoustic means of quantifying them), including vowel quality (formant frequencies, Euclidean distances), vowel dispersion, fricative place of articu- lation (centers of gravity), pitch levels (fundamental frequency, semitones), and pitch variability (pairwise variability index on f0). While this array of features represents a significant improvement since the first phonetic studies of sexuality around 15 years ago, it only scratches the surface of possible features. Munson issues us the important reminder that even though we have identified a number of phonetic features that can index sexuality, we would be foolish to think they constitute an exhaustive list of features that might be used in the phonetic construction of sexuality.

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It is also important to note that the aforementioned features do not work independently of one another and that the analysis of what one feature contributes to a style is facilitated by also considering the features with which it occurs. Although only Campbell-Kibler’s article takes patterns of co-occurrence as its central object of investigation, the other empirical studies locate the variables under consideration in the linguistic context of other variables, such as voice quality (Podesva), pitch patterns (Eckert, Podesva), and discourse features (Eckert, Levon). While studying the covariation of multiple linguistic features presents a methodological challenge, as noted in Hay and Drager (2007), Campbell-Kibler’s article illustrates one means of doing so. We reiterate her call for incorporating more advanced statistical techniques in the study of variable co-occurrence.

SEXUALITY AND THE VERNACULAR

We end by discussing one last issue raised when sexuality is incorporated into the study of variation, namely the vernacular. Are linguistic features that index sexuality to be viewed as vernacular features? The answer, of course, depends on one’s definition ofvernacular , which has been used in a number of related but distinct ways: any nonstandard variety; the first variety of speech acquired; or the least self-conscious style of speech an individual commands. The first definition has been widely criticized for failing to take into account the fact that what counts as standard cannot be held constant as perspectives or contexts shift. In the context of Eckert’s study on preadolescents, for example, speech that might be considered standard in the classroom is anything but standard on the playground. Viewing the vernacular in the second sense, as the first variety of speech acquired, is likewise problematic. As Eckert shows, shifted variants of Califor- nia vowels—which most would uncontroversially label as vernacular features— emerge most significantly relatively late in development, as the heterosexual market begins to reorganize the social order. More marked sexualities, and their linguistic ramifications, develop even later, presenting a problem for the widely held assumption that children develop their vernaculars in early childhood. This has a variety of consequences for thinking about variation, but it certainly rules out a standard critical period view of the acquisition of patterns of variation and raises new questions about the kind of community and exposure people need in order to develop patterns of variation. In his articles, Munson calls for increased attention to how features that index sexuality are acquired. He reviews a number of studies documenting children’s sensitivity and uptake of social indexical information (that does not relate

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to sexuality) and identifies several methodological approaches that might be extended to the study of language and sexuality. Studies noting the use of vernacular features in stylized dialect performances (Schilling-Estes 1998) have drawn attention to the problems of conceptualizing the vernacular in the third sense, as the least self-conscious variety. Similarly, to the extent that we rule out the view of sexual categories as passively different, we have to take seriously the role of conscious and “queer” styles in variation studies, and the relation between actively adopted stereotypes and what we think of as unconscious variation. One of the girls in Eckert’s study produced her most fronted variants of /ow/ when telling narratives, narratives that might be considered performances of heterosexuality. While traditional variationists might well discard stereotyped performances as linguistically unnatural, people who study populations that are seen as using more artifice (e.g., women) are less inclined to draw such a clear line. After all, overt stereotypic performances are built on resources in the social world and provide in turn resources for linguistic change and for the estab- lishment of more widespread norms. At the same time, it is worth considering that inasmuch as indexing nonnormative sexualities can put speakers at considerable risk, it is possibly the richest area for the exploration of the strategic and situated use of individual repertoires. Finally, what we read as “queer” styles are generally quite clearly about social types that transcend sexual categories, revealing a fluidity that belies a focus on sexual groups (as racial groups) in isolation from, or in opposition to, other groups.

CONCLUSION

In introducing this special issue, we have aimed to identify several ways that sociolinguists and laboratory phonologists have each uniquely enriched scholarship on sociophonetics and sexuality. Although they often have distinct research questions and complementary areas of expertise, it is important to recognize that they are more similar than they might appear at first blush.T o discuss just one example, both laboratory phonologists and sociolinguists are interested in how the dynamism of context influences perception.L aboratory phonologists, for instance, might examine how knowing social information (like a speaker’s sexual orientation) primes listeners’ perceptions of linguistic features. Sociolinguists might investigate how sexuality is foregrounded in interaction, which can in turn influence how a feature is perceived, in a discursive variety of priming. We hope that sociolinguists and laboratory phonologists will continue to capitalize on their valuable differences while allowing their shared interests to guide them into fruitful collaborations. The study of language and sexuality will reap the rewards.

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NOTES

We thank the LSA Committee on the Status of Women in Linguistics for sponsoring the symposium from which this special issue emerged. In addition to the contribu- tors to this issue, we owe a special debt to Rusty Barrett and Sally McConnell-Ginet. Rusty started the panel off with an introduction to the central issues at hand, and his ideas have influenced the thoughts we present here. Sally closed the panel with a thought-provoking commentary delivered from her unique perspective as someone who investigates the interface between sociolinguistics and theoretical linguistics— the same interface explored in this issue. Finally, we thank Michael Adams for his enthusiasm and support for this special issue. Although we have been inspired by the aforementioned individuals, all errors are our own.

REFERENCES

Di Paolo, Marianna, and Alice Faber. 1990. “Phonation Differences and the Phonetic Content of the Tense-Lax Contrast in Utah English.” Language Variation and Change 2: 155–204. Eckert, Penelope. 2008. “Variation and the Indexical Field.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 12: 453–76. Foulkes, Paul. 2010. “Exploring Social-Indexical Variation: A Long Past but a Short History.” Laboratory Phonology 1: 5–39. Hay, Jennifer, and Katie Drager. 2007. “Sociophonetics.” Annual Review of Anthropol- ogy 36: 89–103. Johnson, Sally, and Ulrike Hanna Meinhof, eds. 1997. Language and Masculinity. Oxford: Blackwell. Jaffe, Alexandra M. 2009. “Indeterminacy and Regularization: A Process-Based Approach to the Study of Sociolinguistic Variation and Language Ideologies.” Sociolinguistic Studies 3: 229–51. Labov, William, and Maciej Baranowski. 2006. “50 msec.” Language Variation and Change 18: 223–40. Ochs, Elinor. 1992. “Indexing Gender.” In Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, ed. Alessandro Duranti and Charles Goodwin, 335–58. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Schilling-Estes, Natalie. 1998. “Investigating ‘Self-Conscious’ Speech: The Perfor- mance Register in Ocracoke English.” Language in Society 27: 53–83. Silverstein, Michael. 2003. “Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life.” Language and Communication 23: 193–229. Trechter, Sara, and Mary Bucholtz. 2001. “White Noise: Bringing Language into Whiteness Studies.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 11: 3–21.

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