Gender Ideologies and the Construction of Knowledges in Phonetic Sciences

This paper exposes how knowledge construction in phonetic sciences is influenced by gender ideologies. The idea that the production of knowledge is a neutral act is deconstructed and it is instead demonstrated that scientific knowledges are situated knowledges that are shaped by specific assumptions about gender. In the phonetic literature, the body is omnipresent. In descriptions of how human sounds are produced, the body of the speaker is regularly represented by a male body. For example, the human vocal tract is regularly presented as having a length of 17 or 17,5 cm. But this length is not an average of human vocal tracts but an average of male vocal tracts measured in early studies. The consequence of the confusion between human and male is that the male body becomes the norm, and the female body becomes specific, marked, and eventually pathologized. This, for instance, is the case in the literature about Premenstrual Vocal Syndrome, where different physiological phenomena accompanying the female cyclicity are being described as “symptoms” of a “syndrome”. Gender binarism is the third analysed ideology. Phonetic literature produces the idea of binary gender by the way research questions and hypotheses are formulated and by the way experimental protocols are designed. For example, in phonetic texts, the expression “opposite gender/sex” appears regularly, and the human vocal apparatus is systematically described as sexually dimorphic