Page 99 of my dissertation, titled “Hearing Voices as Social Agents,” involves the observation that sparked my interest in auditory verbal hallucinations in the first place: those who hear voices routinely assign social identities to these voices. “I hear the voice of an old German guy,” someone might say. “Another voice is a young boy.” While these identifications seemed unremarkable to many of my interviewees, linguistic anthropological work demonstrates that such classifications are far from natural observations of self-evident characteristics. So, if identity is fundamentally intersubjective and emergent – as argued by Bucholtz and Hall (2005) – then how are these voices, heard only by a single person, assigned gender identities, racial backgrounds, and other socially meaningful positions?

My dissertation overall approaches the question of voices’ identities not as a cognitive reflex or a psychiatric symptom, but as embedded in socially driven semiotic processes. That is, voice-hearing is responsive to local ideologies about language and identity. Page 99 concludes a section on gender in particular as a salient site where these ideologies play out. The vast majority of descriptions of voices include reference to gender, including in the use of third person pronouns. That opened up the space for me to ask a deceptively simple question: “How can you tell that voice is a man/woman?”

My interviewees, who were all English-speaking voice-hearers from the United States or United Kingdom, drew from a range of different gender ideologies in their explanation. Many made reference to vocal pitch as the most salient feature. No other linguistic sign was discussed nearly as much. Several participants drew from trans activism in casting gender identity as an interior feeling that must be self-identified to be authentic; for these participants, voices seen as lacking interiority only seemed to have genders. One participant described a voice coming out to them as having a certain gender identity and sexual orientation. As highlighted throughout my dissertation, auditory hallucinations can do some pretty complex social work!

References

Bucholtz, Mary and Kira Hall. 2005. “Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach.” Discourse Studies, 7(4-5), 585–614.