Language communicates not just what we say, but also who we are. Research demonstrates that speakers use linguistic variation to construct sexual identities and communities. Driven by the question of whether stereotypes about lesbian and gay speech have “real” bases in speech production or perception, the literature in this area is historically preoccupied with differences between lesbian, gay, and straight people. White and cisgender positionalities are overrepresented in this work. As a result, the understanding of sexuality that emerges in this area is white, monosexual, and often mapped onto gender expression. Bisexuality and its intersections with other aspects of identity are not widely considered, leaving the theorization of sexuality incomplete. This dissertation extends the theorization of sexuality by positioning bisexual practices and subjectivities as central to understanding sexuality. The first and second content chapters present quantitative analyses of acoustic data. Both chapters explore how bisexual people produce /s/–the sound associated with the "gay lisp'" stereotype–relative to lesbian, gay, and straight people. The first content chapter focuses on the theorization of the gender-sexuality interface, whereas the second content chapter focuses on the intersection between sexuality, gender, and race. The third content chapter examines how people talk about bisexuality online using a statistical approach called keyness analysis. The chapter provides insights into the concepts and ideologies that characterize discourses of bisexuality online, and identifies numerous avenues for further research on bisexual identity construction. All three content chapters illustrate the value of centering peripheral identities in linguistic research. This dissertation represents the largest body of research on bisexuality within linguistics to date.

The folk linguistic notion that there are systematic differences in speech production as a function of sexual orientation has given rise to a vast body of work investigating the acoustic correlates of sounding queer. Although gay-sounding voices and to a lesser extent lesbian-sounding voices are well represented in this literature, bisexuality is conspicuously absent. The current study addresses this gap through an acoustic analysis of bisexuals' read speech vis-à-vis lesbian, gay, and straight speakers, specifically attending to three measures of the fricative /s/: center of gravity, skew, and duration. The results suggest that bisexual women and men do not form a cohesive group in terms of /s/ production. Moreover, the results indicate that bisexual women differ from lesbian and straight women in a way that is distinct from how bisexual men differ from gay and straight men. Given these results, I argue that (1) grouping bisexual speakers with either straight or lesbian/gay speakers is not empirically justified and (2) the lack of uniformity among the bisexual speakers is potentially explained by the different ways in which bisexual women and men experience the intersection of sexuality and gender normativity. Overall, these findings trouble the stereotype that bisexuality is simply an amalgam of lesbianness/gayness and straightness and shed light on the intersectional experiences of bisexuals.