Research
My work as a sociocultural linguist seeks to expose the complex ways language shapes sociocultural understandings of gender and sexuality, whether emanating from institutions like the media and government or from the interactional practices of everyday life. I analyze how these different scales of discourse are intricately linked, and how they together produce the social systems of gender and sexuality so foundational to human subjectivity.Â
At the heart of this project is my study of the language practices of gender and sexual minorities in northern India, where I have been conducting ethnographic research since 1993. This research laid the foundation for a series of theoretical articles on the relationship between language and identity that I developed in the 2000s with Mary Bucholtz at the University of California, Santa Barbara — a framework we have since extended to include embodied forms of meaning production.
Over the past decade, I have collaborated with other linguists and anthropologists to examine how contemporary political and media platforms strategically weaponize gender and sexual identity. This work includes a discourse analysis of a New York mass hysteria case (with Donna Goldstein), a gestural analysis of Donald Trump's body language (with Donna Goldstein and Matthew Bruce Ingram), several editorials and position papers on anti-gender rhetoric (with Mie Hiramoto, Rodrigo Borba, Rusty Barrett, and Maureen Kosse), and a semiotic framework for understanding sexuality discourses (with Rusty Barrett). Most recently, my attention has turned to neurodiversity as a critical area for sociocultural linguistic consideration (with Ayden Parish), highlighted by my research on the autistic adoption of non-local accents and specialized registers as a strategic masking tool. In the links to the right, I provide more detailed information about these primary research areas.