While recent work in sociophonetics has focused on the speech of gay men (Gaudio 1994; Podesva 2007; Podesva, Roberts & Campbell-Kibler 2002), lesbian women (Camp 2009; Van Borsel Vandaele & Corthals 2013), and transgender people (Zimman 2017a), the speech styles of asexual individuals remain understudied. This study analyzes an
interview with a graysexual and homoromantic cisgender student at a research university in California, examining the segmental and
prosodic characteristics of three voices he uses to construct and position his graysexual identity: a questioning voice, a
judgmental voice, and a non-desiring voice. The analysis finds that the questioning voice is characterized by decreased speech
rate, high F0, and modal phonation; the judgmental voice, by low F0; and the non-desiring voice, by low F0, narrow F0 range, low
intensity, reduced gesture, flat facial expression, and a centralized vowel space. The results emphasize the importance of
stylistic reticence to the construction of graysexuality.
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2002Sharing resources and indexing meanings in the production of gay styles. In Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice, Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Robert J. Podesva, Sarah J. Roberts & Andrew Wong (eds), 175–189. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
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2017aGender as stylistic bricolage: Transmasculine voices and the relationship between fundamental frequency and /s/. Language in Society 46(3): 339–370.
Zimman, Lal
2017bOperationalizing stance: Affective stance in a pervasively creaky transgender speaker. (Paper presented at the 91st Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Austin, Texas)
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Brown, Gwendolyn, Andreea Cheva, Megan Fraser & Robert J. Zeglin
2023. Asexuality: a content analysis of sex therapy journals. Psychology & Sexuality 14:1 ► pp. 17 ff.
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