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Girl Talk: Understanding Negative Reactions to Female Vocal Fry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2021

Monika Chao  and
Julia R. S. Bursten Open the ORCID record for Julia R. S. Bursten [Opens in a new window]
Monika Chao*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of California–Berkeley, 314 Moses Hall #2390, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
Julia R. S. Bursten
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Kentucky, 1415 Patterson Office Tower, Lexington, KY 40506, USA
*
Corresponding author mchaos@berkeley.edu
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Abstract

Vocal fry is a phonation, or voicing, in which an individual drops their voice below its natural register and consequently emits a low, growly, creaky tone of voice. Media outlets have widely acknowledged it as a generational vocal style characteristic of millennial women. Critics of vocal fry often claim that it is an exclusively female vocal pattern, and some say that the voicing is so distracting that they cannot understand what is being said under the phonation. Claiming that a phonation is so distracting as to prevent uptake of the semantic content of an utterance associated with it is an extreme reaction, especially when accompanied by demands for women to change their phonation. We argue that this reaction limits women's communicative autonomy. We analyze the extreme reaction to female vocal fry, which we characterize as a non-content-based response, from the perspectives of philosophy of language, feminist epistemology, and linguistics. We argue that when fry is heard as annoying and distracting, it is because the hearer interprets the speaker as echoing an utterance from a position of authority to which she is not entitled. We show that this reaction encodes conscious or unconscious sexist attitudes toward women's voices.

Type
Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , Winter 2021 , pp. 42 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hypatia, a Nonprofit Corporation

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