Voices of masculinity: Men’s talk in Hungarian university dormitories

Abstract

Research on language and masculinity has been imbued with a paradoxical juxtaposition of seeing White heterosexual men and their language as a ‘default’ and the paucity of empirical studies on what these men actually do in their everyday linguistic practices. This article examines the multivoicedness of masculinities in a specific local context. We analyze Hungarian male university students’ spontaneous conversations, recently recorded in the Budapest University Dormitory Corpus. Drawing on the Bakhtinian concept of voice, we argue that individual and social voices of masculinity, as well as the contrasts between them, are embedded in gendered and sexualized inequality relations. Even pro-feminist and ‘gay’ voices in the interactions are structured by social inequalities. The voicing of a homosexual figure does not only evoke negatively valued unmasculine behaviors, but also helps in creating homosocial (same-gender and non-sexualized) intimacy. It always happens as a stylized image of ‘another’s language’.