Analysis of the visual prosody of gays cisgenders

Abstract

This study focuses in the relationship between prosody, gestures and cisgender gay subjects, in reason to continue the studies that correlate such parts and to corroborate the advances in research on the LGBTQ+ community. It is known that gestures concomitant with speech are important resources for human communication (KRAHMER, SWERTS, 2007; PACHECO, 2011; PACHECO, OLIVEIRA 2016; DIAS, 2018, and others). These authors emphasize that facial and manual movements provide prosodic information and act as a significant resource to the perception of the message, pointing to what they name visual prosody or gestural prosody. Having said that, the present research is justified by the need to associate visual prosody with questions about human sexuality. Guided by the question “is there a specific gestural prosodic pattern of these subjects?” and bringing the hypothesis of the existence of this pattern, we aim to investigate the facial and manual gestures concomitant with the speech prosody of gay and straight subjects who produce content for the streaming platform Youtube (youtube.com). To achieve the objectives of this work, 11 (eleven) videos available on the Youtube platform were selected, in which we identified emphases, pauses, lengthening and interrogatives, total and partial types (MORAES, 1998), and we mapped the facial and manual movements present in these prosodic events produced by gay and straight cisgender subjects. Thus, to analyze facial gestures, we used Ekman and Friesen's (1976) facial action code system and Bressem's (2013) gestural analysis system to deal with manual gestures. The results obtained were 486 occurrences, adding emphasis, lengthening, pauses and interrogatives with varied attitudes, in which we identified 996 facial movements, ranging from positions of the eyes, eyebrows, eyelids, mouth to positions and head movements, among others, and 2,054 manual movements expressed with both hands, varied types of movements, palms orientation in the horizontal, vertical, diagonal axes, etc. These results signaled that there was no visual prosodic pattern, based on facial and manual gestures, produced by gay cisgender, nor are these more expressive than straight cisgender men. Despite this, the results highlight the importance of gestures, especially facial movements, as prosodic phenomena.