Femininity and Phonetics in Drag Names

ANS 2025, February 22, 2025 Femininity and Phonetics in Drag Names by Mary Ann Walter Recent research investigates linguistic variables in relation to the performance of gender in drag performances, especially in the choice of drag queen stage names (Barrett 2017, Slordahl 2022, Marjanovic 2023). To date, these studies focus on lexical and semantic aspects of these names. Yet several phonetic variables have also been shown to index perceived ‘femininity’, including higher ratios of open syllables, vowels compared to consonants, high front vowels compared to others, and sonorants relative to obstruents. Such differences have been documented for different Englishspeaking communities as well as other languages (Slater & Feinman, 1985; Cutler et al., 1990; Wright et al., 2005; Sidhu & Pexman 2015; Chen and Kenstowicz 2022; Walter, 2023). This study tests the correlation of ‘feminine’-indexed phonetic variables in American drag names, relative to American male and female names in general. In a corpus of 200 drag names and 200 ‘mainstream’ names, I find that the drag names are statistically indistinguishable from the mainstream female names for two of the tested phonetic variables. For the other two, they fall into an intermediate position between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. In contrast, the drag names are significantly different from mainstream ‘masculine’ names for three of the phonetic variables, and marginally different for the fourth. I conclude that phonetic aspects of stage name selection play a role in drag performances of femininity. Additional analysis suggests that this effect has intensified over the last fifteen years. Biography: Mary Ann Walter is Associate Professor of English at the University of the Virgin Islands. She has also taught at the Middle East Technical University (Northern Cyprus), Cambridge, Plovdiv, and Northwestern, with degrees in linguistics from Harvard and MIT. Her interests include phonology, phonetics, and sociolinguistics of English, Balkan, and Middle Eastern languages.