Male Sounds and Speech Affectations: Voicing Masculinity

This chapter examines the role of speech affectations in presenting and performing maleness in order to explore the relationship between the male voice and male identity. Focusing on how utterances construct or challenge the image of male identity fostered on screen, the chapter draws examples from two actors in particular - Humphrey Bogart and James Earl Jones - to consider how their speech affectations, a lisp and stutter respectively, inform their construction of character and performance of masculinity. Considering the speech affectations of Bogart and Jones demonstrate not just the centrality of the voice to the construction of persona, character and gender, but also how a voice can undermine that construction, its very vocal tenets starkly opposing the characteristics of a gendered identity.