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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1292

Part of Session 157: Dialect Perceptions in the City (Other abstracts in this session)

Expanding the “Urban”/ “Rural” Binary: Evidence from Listener Perceptions of Gay Male Speakers of Southern American English

Authors: Mann, Stephen L.
Submitted by: Mann, Stephen L. (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, United States of America)

Highlighted in interviews and focus groups I conducted in the U.S. American South is a folk belief that “sounding gay” and “sounding Southern” are contradictory concepts. I provide an explanation for this folk belief by examining how prevailing ideologies of gender, class, and rurality shape listener attitudes toward speakers of gay male varieties of American English. The analysis I present is based on folk linguistic approaches to the study of language attitudes and use (Niedzielski & Preston 2003 [2000]). Folk dialectologists strive to differentiate between the etic views of language studied by linguists and the emic views of language held by non-linguists (Preston 1986).

Data are drawn from three sources. I conducted interviews with eight self-identified gay men and four self-identified straight men in a mid-sized city in the southeastern United States. Interviews total approximately fifteen hours of recorded speech. I then used short speech samples from the interviews in an online attitude and perception study, using a survey instrument adapted from Campbell-Kibler (2007). I also conducted two focus groups using the speech samples from the attitude and perception study. My analysis focuses primarily on two of the men whom I interviewed: David and Andrew (both pseudonyms). Both men were consistently identified as southerners in the attitude and perception study and during the focus groups. David, however, was consistently identified as gay, and Andrew was consistently perceived to be straight.

My findings suggest that judgments of sexual orientation are complicated by ideologies of gender, class, and rurality – ideologies, which are also linked together in complex ways. If a male speaker who “sounds southern” is judged to sound masculine – such as Andrew – then he cannot also be heard as “sounding gay.” Ideologies of masculinity in the South rely on images of hypermasculine, rural, working class men, which conflict with local attitudes toward and beliefs about homosexuality. If a male speaker who “sounds southern” is judged to sound feminine or effeminate, however, he can be judged by listeners to “sound gay.” Listeners do not associate these men – such as David – with the rural, working class South. Instead, they are referred to as either middle-class “provincial,” i.e., as being associated with a small town in the South, or as “blue blood,” i.e., as being from the upper class in a prominent southern city. Attitudes toward and perceptions of gay male speakers in the American South, therefore, provide evidence that a simple “urban” / “rural” dichotomy is not sufficient to explain dialect perception in this region. Listeners instead create links between “rural,” “provincial,” and “urban,” on one hand, and working class, middle class, and “blue blood,” respectively, on the other.

Campbell-Kibler, Kathryn. 2007. Accent, (ING), and the social logic of listener perceptions. American Speech 82(1). 32-64.

Niedzielski, Nancy A. & Dennis R. Preston. 2003 [2000]. Folk linguistics, paperback edn. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Preston, Dennis R. 1986. Introduction. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 57. 5-8.