EmmaMachadode Souza
PhD Candidate in Linguistics at the Universidad de Salamanca.
Profile
I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Spanish Language at the Universidad de Salamanca, on a PR-2023 contract from the Junta de Castilla y León and the ESF+. My dissertation asks how transfeminine voices are produced and heard in Peninsular Spanish, which means measuring the acoustics of spontaneous speech and then asking listeners what they thought they heard.
I also publish in clinical linguistics, mainly the speech of people living with depression or with cognitive decline, and on the language used to talk about trans people and about neurodivergence.
What I work on
Trans and queer linguistics
Language as evidence of trans and queer life, and as an instrument used on it. I work with recorded voices, online communities, parliamentary debate and clinical protocols, which is to say with people describing themselves and with strangers doing it for them at greater length.
Sociophonetics
The voice as social behavior, measured acoustically. Spontaneous speech and perception experiments, on the assumption that what a listener does with a voice is at least as interesting as what the speaker meant by it.
Clinical linguistics
Speech in depression and in cognitive decline, and the distance between a statistically significant difference and a diagnostic marker. The literature crosses it faster than I do.
Critical discourse analysis
How parliamentary, biomedical and online discourses name and regulate trans identity and neurodivergence, and what the communities on the receiving end write back.
Language technology
Corpora, classifiers and large language models, for questions too large to answer by hand. They also make excellent informants on what has been said about the people they describe, having read most of it.
Selected publications
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Machado de Souza, E. (2026). Reframing neurodivergence: How digital neuroqueer communities resist pathologizing discourses and generate counter-hegemonic narratives. A critical discourse analysis of neuroqueer counter-narratives. Feral Feminisms, 17, 46-64.
Article Trans and queer linguisticsCritical discourse analysis
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Machado de Souza, E. (2026). Naming, excluding, disciplining: Contested parliamentary discourses on trans issues. Language, Discourse & Society, 14(1), 11-29.
Article Trans and queer linguisticsCritical discourse analysis
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Machado de Souza, E. (2025). La voz como herramienta de identidad y resistencia: modulación vocal y autoafirmación en personas trans y no binarias. MariCorners: Revista de Estudios Interdisciplinares LGTBIA+ y Queer, 2(2), 161-194.
Article Trans and queer linguisticsSociophonetics
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Ivanova, O., Machado de Souza, E., Méndez Sanz, S., & Ochoa Obeso, E. (2023). La evaluación de la competencia pragmática en las enfermedades neurodegenerativas: retos teóricos y metodológicos. Pragmalingüística, 31, 193-220.
Article Clinical linguistics