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Stereotypes (and their consequences) have been widely examined across contexts and cultures with thousands of articles from various disciplines detailing their effects over the better part of a century. While similar stereotypic content may be applicable to multiple individuals from differing social groups (e.g., both men and professors may be perceived as competent), individuals and researchers alike tend to focus on a singular category, rather than the intersection of multiple categories. Intersectional stereotypes, on the other hand, are a more recent development based on the theory of intersectionality and have seen increased attention over the past few decades. This extension of basic stereotyping was created to better understand the process in which multiple social categories may influence the stereotypes applied to certain social groups. A majority of the research on intersectional stereotyping has focused on the most prevalent groups in society, opting to include gender (e.g., men or women), race (e.g., white or black individuals), or common sexual orientation categories (e.g., gay men). While this is not inherently wrong, because in order to understand an effect, we must first identify patterns using the most visible groups, this has led to the underrepresentation of certain social categories such as immigrant status (e.g., native versus foreign individuals) or other sexual orientations (e.g., lesbian women). Therefore, the main goal of this thesis is to dive into the contradicting effects of intersectionality and intersectional stereotyping using various social groups. Importantly, we examined different groups throughout the projects included in this thesis although the running theme throughout was intersectionality.
The identification of intersectional stereotypes for various immigrant groups and nationalities is first examined in Chapters 2.2 and 2.3.1 by developing an adaptation of Petsko and Bodenhausen’s (2019) methodology regarding the de-racialization of intersectional individuals. We found comparable results in which gay immigrants were perceived as less prototypical of immigrants, experiencing a “de-immigrantization” effect, but this effect was not replicated when examining lesbian immigrants (who were prototypically similar to immigrant women), adding complexity to the conceptualization of multiple minority members. The effect of deimmigrantization was also explored with a different paradigm meant to bring findings from conceptual, to a realized, point of view, by using fictional candidates’ curricula veritas (CVs) in Chapter 3.4. In conditions that promote heuristic processes, straight Brazilian immigrants were stereotypically evaluated and penalized, while being gay seemed to protect Brazilian immigrants from receiving such prejudiced evaluations. Next, Chapters 4.2 and 4.3.1 examined the vocal categorization and stereotyping of straight or gay immigrants in Portugal; notably, we found that participants made stereotypical judgements of individuals based on their voices, when speaking both English and Portuguese. Gay voices were perceived as being more feminine and Brazilians speaking in English were evaluated the worst on stereotypical measures, supporting the notion behind stereotyping multiple identities, but, Portuguese speaking English individuals were recalled the least, bringing into question the applicability of intersectional theories in different paradigms. Finally, Chapter 4.4.3 continues the theme of evaluative judgements, adding further contents to the methodologies used in stereotype assessment research, while acting as a pretest for the former two subchapters. When testing stereotypical and counterstereotypical behaviors, we found that stereotypical individuals (e.g., masculine straight men) were perceived as prototypical of their main groups (e.g., straight men) while counterstereotypical individuals (e.g., feminine straight men) were not.
The overall findings of this thesis provide not only the contextualization of prior literature to a Portuguese context, but also show support for theories of intersectional stereotyping, the implicit inversion theory, the prototypicality of various social groups, and how external indicators (i.e., voice) may influence the categorization of individuals from multiple social categories. While there is yet work to be completed in the Portuguese context and abroad, this thesis provides a strong starting point for which intersectionality, and its contradicting effects, may be examined in regard to immigrant status and sexual orientation.
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Keywords
Intersectionality Stereotypes Immigration Sexual orientation Vocal stereotypes