Gender and the voice: comparing metadiscourse in vlogs, interviews and scientific discourse

Voice is one of the linguistic features most often mentioned as shaping gender identity, but remains understudied. Yet voice is a key issue in gender transition and in the performance of gender and sexual identities (Munson 2007, Podesva & Kajino 2014, Arnold 2015). This study thus investigates the terms used by different actors to speak about voice from a gender perspective. Relying on a feminist epistemology (Cameron et al. 1992), we draw a common framework between researchers and LGBTQI+ people, and people questioning gender issues through voice. For this purpose, we collected three corpora: vlogs produced by non-binary people, interviews with vlog authors, and scientific discourse on the sociophonetics of gender. We looked at differences in metadiscourse related to audience design (Bell 1984) in the vlogs corpus, the interactional construction of categories (Greco 2006) in the interviews, and the construction of conceptual terminology for studying gender and voice in scientific discourse (Cameron et al. 1992, Arnold 2016). This research aims first to build a common language for committed sociolinguistic research, “speaking with” instead of “speaking of”. Second, the terms in use also reveal different understandings of gender, contributing to the ideological debate in gender studies. Last, this study provides insight on gender identity in computer-mediated communication and the digital realm.