Research Areas

• Sociolinguistics
• Linguistic Anthropology
• Language and Identity
• Discourse
• Narrative
• Language, Gender, and Sexuality
• Code-switching and Bilingualism
• Language, Nationalism, and Globalization
• Critical Gender/Sexuality Theory

Field Areas  

• South Asia, especially northern India

Current Projects

I am currently involved in four interrelated projects that seek to advance the theoretical understanding of identity within sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and socially oriented discourse analysis.

• In collaboration with Mary Bucholtz from the University of California at Santa Barbara, I have been developing a framework for the sociocultural study of identity, termed tactics of intersubjectivity. Discussions of this framework have appeared in Language in Society 33(4) [pdf] and in Alessandro Duranti's (ed.) A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology [pdf], and Discourse Studies 7(4-5) [pdf].

• My book manuscript, tentatively entitled From Tooth to Tusk: Language, Gender, and Sexuality among India's Hijras, focuses on linguistic practice as a means of uncovering the ideological underpinnings of hijra identity. The book draws from almost a decade of ethnographic and sociolinguistic research in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, and Uttar Pradesh among Hindi-speaking hijras, a social group commonly discussed in the English-speaking press as "eunuchs." The chapters that constitute the book, influenced by several different research traditions within linguistic anthropology, variously explore the hijras' life narratives, their use of sexualized verbal insult [pdf] and gendered code-switching [pdf], the relationship between language choice, socioeconomic class, and sexual identity, the semiotics of hijra kinship, the interplay between hijra identity and other contemporary liminal identities such as kotis and gay men, and finally, the lexical code that some community members call "Farsi," an alternative vocabulary often employed by the hijras as a means of authenticating hijra identity as historically continuous and socially viable.

• As an extension of the book manuscript, I am in the process of analyzing parodic performances by self-identified kotis, a group of purported “fake-hijras” in New Delhi who, like the hijras they imitate, claim a long-standing indigenous identity that dates back to the period of medieval Mughal rule. While the kotis perceive their own identity as distinctive from that of the hijras, they imitate hijras as part and parcel of being koti, regularly engaging in a performance event they call "hijra-acting." In this staged activity, the kotis do hijra drag by performing the role of hijras at birth celebrations, parodying Hindi-speaking hijras and their upper middle-class English-speaking patrons. These parodic performances illustrate the ways in which desire itself is intertextual in nature, expressed through and against ideological "texts" of sexuality associated with particular gendered and classed positions. An initial discussion of this research is available in Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1):125-144 [pdf].

• Finally, my most recent work focuses on the role of sexuality in Hindi-English code-switching in northern India. In particular, I examine the ways in which speakers associated with alternative sexual and gender identities (i.e. hijras, kotis, boys, lesbians, and gay men) engage with global and national discourses that legitimate English as the language of modernity and Hindi as the language of tradition. Because Hindu nationalism has become increasingly associated with the Hindi language, such groups tend to view Hindi to some extent as an oppressive medium for the expression of both sexual practice and sexual identity, rejecting traditionalist assumptions regarding the position of Hindi in the contemporary nation-state. Yet the terms of this rejection vary from group to group, primarily as a result of divergent and often oppositional understandings of the place of Hindi and English for the articulation of sexual modernity.