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 鈥渢hird sex鈥� because of their identification as neither man nor woman; kotis, cross-dressing men who marry聽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鈥攅ven radically particularized鈥攖o 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 more recent work examines the bilingual practices of the globalized middle classes in urban India. 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 鈥楬inglish鈥�),聽inform聽the emergence of new forms of sexual subjectivity arising in and around India鈥檚 capital, New Delhi. Because Hindi and English are ideologically bound to contrastive dichotomies of personhood鈥攖raditional vs. modern, rural vs. urban, working class vs. upper class, local vs. global鈥攖hey are used as resources in the production of particular kinds of sexual selves.
From the discipline of anthropology, I take the insight that the relationship between language and social meaning is best uncovered through ethnography, a time-intensive empirical method requiring longitudinal participant observation with the speakers, languages, and societies under study. In the case of my research in New Delhi, this method has revealed the complexity of ways that India鈥檚 rising global economy has worked to sediment the status of English as a language of modernity, and more specifically, of sexual modernity.聽My publications in this area over the last decade include a 2005 article聽Intertextual Sexuality聽in Journal of Linguistic Anthropology on the kotis鈥� contrasting impersonations of hijras and gay men聽and a 2009 article 聽in Pichler and Eppler鈥檚 Gender and Spoken Interaction on divergent uses of Hindi and English by groups identifying as boys and lesbians. My 2014 commentary聽Hypersubjectivity聽in Journal of Asian Pacific Communication considers the role of global聽movement in bringing about the kinds of indexical shifts between form and meaning seen in Delhi鈥檚 expanding middle class, and my 2013 commentary聽"It's a Hijra": Queer Linguistics Revisted聽in the journal Discourse &聽Society questions queer theory鈥檚 ability to account for these shifts, given what I view to聽be its very limited, if not static, understanding of identity. In this latter article, I propose聽that the concept of indexicality as advanced by sociocultural linguists provides a much more powerful way of understanding identity as something that is multilayered and always shifting across time and space, both presupposed and created anew in every act of discourse.
Over the past decade, I have been developing a book manuscript on language and sexuality in India that analyzes the ways that social meanings attributed to Hindi and English have shifted under globalization. With Rusty Barrett, I am currently editing the聽Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality, scheduled for publication in 2018.