�鶹��Ѱ�����

(currently being updated) 

Much of my research on language, gender, and sexuality involves groups associated with non-normative systems of sexuality and gender in India. These groups include hijras, a traditional Indian group identified in anthropological scholarship as a “third sex” because of their identification as neither man nor woman; kotis, cross-dressing men who marry women yet have male sexual partners; gays and lesbians, groups that emerged in India in the 1990s through HIV-AIDS activism and orient to a Western model of same-sex sexuality; and boys or TGs, a burgeoning category of persons assigned female at birth who wish to live their lives as men. The claims I make about the language practices of these groups are very specific — even radically particularized — to the localized sociocultural environs in which they occur. At the same time, my work reveals that every local use of language is deeply informed by broader ideologies of language and personhood that circulate at higher levels, whether urban, regional, national, or global.

While my early work focused on the language practices of Hindi-speaking hijras in Varanasi, my subsequent work examined the bilingual practices of the globalized middle classes in urban India. In this body of work, I am particularly interested in how Hindi and English, along with a range of hybrid language varieties situated between these two extremes (now often labeled as ‘Hinglish’), inform the emergence of new forms of sexual subjectivity arising in and around India’s capital, New Delhi. Because Hindi and English are ideologically bound to contrastive dichotomies of personhood — traditional vs. modern, rural vs. urban, working class vs. upper class, local vs. global — they are used as resources in the production of particular kinds of sexual selves.

From anthropology, I take the insight that the relationship between language and social meaning is best uncovered through ethnography, a time-intensive empirical method requiring long-term participant observation. In my research in Delhi, this approach reveals how India's rising global economy has cemented English as a language of modernity, and specifically sexual modernity. My publications in this area over the last two decades include ��(Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2005), on kotis’ contrasting impersonations of hijras versus gay men, and ��(Gender and Spoken Interaction, 2009), on divergent uses of Hindi and English by transmasculine- versus lesbian-identified groups.