TheGayVoice · Beyond “Straight Talking”: The Consequences of Vocal Cues to to Sexual Identity for Modern Prejudice

Beyond “Straight Talking”: The Consequences of Vocal Cues to Sexual Identity for Modern Prejudice

This project investigated the impact of auditory gaydar cues on discrimination and communication. Research showed that individuals use voice to guess others’ sexual orientation and that such gaydar judgments are somewhat accurate and informed by stereotypes. Less was known about beliefs that people have about auditory gaydar and whether such beliefs were related to gaydar accuracy or stereotyping. We first examined voice-related beliefs by deploying a literature on “essentialist beliefs.” We investigated heterosexuals’ beliefs that voice is a fixed and immutable cue of sexual orientation (immutability), that people can intentionally convey or conceal their sexuality through voice (intentionality), and that gay and straight voices are distinctly different from each other (discreteness). We tested whether such beliefs were related to prejudice, and how straight individuals’ beliefs informed their auditory gaydar judgments. The second objective was to describe the targets’ perspective on auditory gaydar. Recently anecdotes about gay men being discriminated against because of their voices hit the headlines and became a topic of debate. We conducted a systematic survey of these experiences, finding that they were far more common among gay men than among lesbian women. The third objective examined whether vocal cues of sexual orientation can trigger discrimination. In modern societies where discrimination laws that protect LGBT people exist, auditory gaydar may trigger subtle, and possibly unconscious, discrimination. We tested this in the workplace context, focusing on whether having a gay- or lesbian-sounding voice prompts discrimination against individuals applying for leadership positions. Experiments found a robust pattern of discrimination against women who sound lesbian. Finally, in our forth objective, we investigated whether being labelled with a homophobic slur can be interpreted differently depending on the guessed speakers’ sexual orientation. Overall this project paints a richer intersectional picture of auditory gaydar in which target’s perspectives loom larger than they do in the literature on gaydar accuracy. Auditory gaydar is linked to prejudicial beliefs, and is a cue to discrimination and stigmatisation. It commonly impacts the lives of gay men and impacts lesbians in situation-specific ways. Auditory gaydar has more limited effects on the power to “reclaim” homophobic language than previous research has suggested. Auditory gaydar is a more robust prompt to modern homophobic prejudice than previously thought, and those who sound gay/lesbian, rather than identify as gay/lesbian are its targets.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union