City Research Online

Abstract

This paper explores transmasculine participants’ lived experiences of “doing passing” in social interactions, illustrating how they both take advantage of and are constrained by normative gendered styles and discourses in the intersubjective negotiation of their gender identities. Phenomenological analysis is used to demonstrate participants’ strategic approaches to the performance of passing in interactions, highlighting the linguistic signifiers that felt important (vocal pitch frequency and variation, lexical choice, and speech content), and the discourses that make the performance of gender meaningful in interactions. The analysis further conveys participants’ complex emotional relationships with passing, a phenomenon identified as cisnormative, binary, and obscuring of trans and queer identities. The authors argue that normative gendered styles and discourses are highly salient in transmasculine people's interactive doing of passing, through providing the terms by which a gender identity becomes intersubjectively legible, while simultaneously limiting a person's ability to do their identity creatively and congruently.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This article has been accepted for publication in Gender and Language by University of Toronto Press. The version of record will be available online at: https://utppublishing.com/journal/gl
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology H Social Sciences > HM Sociology H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine R Medicine > RC Internal medicine > RC0321 Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry
Departments:	School of Health & Medical Sciences School of Health & Medical Sciences > Department of Allied Health
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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