Open AccessThe weight of the voice: gender, privilege, and qualic apperception
Author(s) -
Archie Crowley
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
toronto working papers in linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1718-3510
DOI - 10.33137/twpl.v43i1.35969
Subject(s) - qualia , privilege (computing) , psychology , apperception , tone (literature) , power (physics) , social psychology , identity (music) , aesthetics , linguistics , cognitive psychology , consciousness , computer science , art , philosophy , physics , computer security , quantum mechanics , neuroscience
For transmasculine individuals who undergo testosterone therapy, a lower pitch is often one of the most desired results, both for personal affirmation as well as for how a low pitch is gendered by others. This paper explores how members from a peer support group for transmasculine individuals articulate their experiences taking testosterone. During interviews participants discussed their apperception of the acoustic changes in their voices (Zimman 2012, 2018) as well as the recognition of this change by others. In this paper, I explore how their apperceptions of their voices are organized around a cluster of related qualia of the voice (Harkness 2014, 2017) such as “heaviness”, “deepness”, “resonance”, and social “weightiness”. As their voices lower in pitch over time and they are more frequently gendered as men in social spaces, they navigate shifting positionalities of privilege, and I show how their descriptions of their voices naturalize various qualia of the voice, linking “deepness” to the social “weight”, or power, of a voice.