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Middle class timelines: Ethnic humor and sexual modernity in Delhi

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 August 2019

Kira Hall
Kira Hall*
Affiliation:
University of Colorado Boulder, USA
*
Address for correspondence: Kira Hall, Department of Linguistics, 295 UCB, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado 80309-0295, USA[email protected]
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Abstract

The rise of India's global economy has reinforced a perception of English as a language of sexual modernity within the expanding middle classes. This article explores this perception in the multilingual humor of Hindi-speaking Delhi youth marginalized for sexual and gender difference. Their joking routines feature the Sikh Sardarji, a longstanding ethnic figure often caricatured as circulating in modernity but lacking the English competence to understand modernity's semiotics. Reflective of the economic restructuring that ushered in the millennium, the humor supports a normative progress narrative that prioritizes an ethnically unmarked urban middle class. At the same time, the lesbian, bisexual, and transgender youth who tell these jokes—still criminalized under Section 377 when this fieldwork was conducted—shift this narrative by positioning sexual knowledge at modernity's forefront. The analysis reveals how sexual modernity—here viewed as constituted in everyday interaction through competing configurations of place, time, and personhood—relies on normativity even while defining itself against it. (Chronotope, ethnic humor, formulaic jokes, globalization, Hindi-English, Hinglish, media, middle class, normativity, sexual modernity, temporality)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 48 , Special Issue 4: Navigating Normativities: Gender and Sexuality in Text and Talk , September 2019 , pp. 491 - 517
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

*

I thank India's brilliant, generous, and pathbreaking LGBT activist Betu Singh (1964–2013) and her welcoming circle of Delhi friends, especially Cath, Maya, and Sujata. This article benefitted from discussions with graduate students in my 2017 and 2019 CU Boulder seminars as well as audiences at BLS 40, LISO 2013, LLL 20, Queen Mary University of London, Syracuse University, and University of Bern. Deep thanks go to Language in Society editor Jenny Cheshire, the anonymous reviewers, editors Molly Mullin and Audra Starcheus, and many others for their important insights, including Tarren Andrews, Marcus Avelar, Rusty Barrett, Mary Bucholtz, Jillian Cavanaugh, Cynthia Gordon, Leanne Hinton, Olivia Hirschey Marrese, Velda Khoo, Maureen Kosse, Bill Leap, Erez Levon, Tommaso Milani, Bhuvana Narasimhan, Sabina Perrino, Ben Rampton, Sasha Romanova, Devyani Sharma, Muhammad Sheeraz, Kahlil B. Thomas, Crispin Thurlow, Andrew Ting, and especially Donna Goldstein.

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