From “Gay Lisp” to “Fierce Queen”: The Sociophonetics of Sexuality’s Most Iconic Variable

Abstract

The sound of the queer voice has captured the intrigue of the popular and sociolinguistic imagination, spurring a wave of research investigating what makes someone “sound gay.” This chapter follows the trajectory of the sociophonetics of LGBTQ+ speakers, focusing on what is perhaps the most robustly studied phonetic variable in queer linguistics: the /s/ sound. The chapter explores how a group of non-normative drag queens in San Francisco use acoustic dimensions of /s/ to project radical queerness, illustrating how this community’s practices bear on greater conversations in sociolinguistics involving the connection between phonetic variation and the articulation of identity.