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* Special thanks to Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Jenny Cheshire, Penny Eckert, Miriam Meyerhoff, Nicolai Pharao, Jane Stuart-Smith, Lal Zimman, two anonymous reviewers, and audience members at NWAV 41 at Indiana University in 2012 and ExAPP 2 at the University of Copenhagen in 2013 for their comments on earlier stages of this research. I would also like to express my gratitude to the three speakers for lending me their voices, and to the numerous colleagues who helped me to distribute the online experiment. All errors and shortcomings are, of course, my own.
Introduction
Stereotypes have a profound impact on our perceptions of the people we encounter. Research in social psychology over the past forty years has demonstrated that individuals draw on pre-existing beliefs and attitudes about social categories (i.e. stereotypes) when forming initial impressions of others (e.g. Higgins & Bargh 1987; Macrae & Bodenhausen 2001), and recent work in linguistics has shown that such category-based perception can also affect how speech itself is processed (e.g. Johnson, Strand, & D'Imperio 1999; Niedzielski 1999; Hay, Warren, & Drager 2006). In this article, I examine how stereotypical expectations regarding category membership influence listeners' perceptions of indexical speech. Specifically, I investigate the intersection of perceptions of gender, sexuality, and social class among men in order to determine the extent to which the identification of a speaker as a member of a particular social group (working-class, for example) may impede his identification as another (e.g. gay). My goal in doing so is to examine the linguistic perception of sexuality in its wider social context, and, as a result, to contribute to the development of a better understanding of the process through which variants come to evoke social meaning in the course of everyday interaction (Podesva 2007; Campbell-Kibler 2009; Foulkes 2010).
The issue of defining the relationship between a linguistic form and its associated social meaning (i.e. indexicality) is one that has garnered a significant amount of attention in the recent sociolinguistics literature (e.g. Eckert 2008, 2012). These discussions have centred primarily on the difficulty of ascribing a single and stable meaning to a given variant. Instead, scholars have argued that variants are ideologically linked to a range of related potential social meanings, any one of...