From birth, social expectations of gender performance in speech - of what it means to “talk like a boy” or girl - are reinforced in most aspects of family, culture, and media. Despite this, there are those who reject the... [ view full abstract ]
From birth, social expectations of gender performance in speech - of what it means to “talk like a boy” or girl - are reinforced in most aspects of family, culture, and media. Despite this, there are those who reject the gender binary: 30% of transgender adults surveyed in 2015 identify as nonbinary[1]. Nonbinary people represent a population that is growing despite most external influences minimizing or erasing them. The purpose of this research is to examine the speech of nonbinary people with the understanding that it exists outside of the confines of binary descriptors, but must be constructed and performed within a system where every act is assigned a binary label. I hypothesise that nonbinary speakers use a combination of cues perceived as masculine and feminine in tandem to create incongruence, as a way to signal their identity as one outside of binary expectations.
To examine the ways nonbinary speakers use speech to encode their gender identity, a novel corpus has been created. The RAINBO[2] corpus contains the selfies and transcribed audio recordings of nonbinary (8) speakers in a variety of natural conversations, as well as sociolinguistic interviews centred on the nonbinary experience of gender. For each nonbinary speaker, two demographically-similar binary speakers (one male, one female) have also been recorded. Each speaker has been recorded in 3-6 conversational contexts, varying in location, topics of conversation, and the nature of the relationship to the conversational partner.
My presentation will introduce the RAINBO corpus and situate my research in the broader literature. Using both quantitative statistical methods, and qualitative discourse analysis, I will examine speech congruency within speakers, and differences in speech pitch and pitch range[3] across contexts and speakers.
[1] James, S. E., Herman, J. L., Rankin, S., Keisling, M., Mottet, L., & Anafi, M. (2016). The Report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey. Washington, DC: National Center for Transgender Equality
[2] Recorded Audiovisual Interviews with Nonbinary and Binary Orators
[3] Mears, D. (2014). Theoretical accounts of phonetic correlates of gender (Doctoral dissertation, Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, University of Cambridge).
