My work as a linguistic anthropologist and sociolinguist seeks to expose the complex ways in which language contributes to sociocultural understandings of gender and sexuality, whether emanating from institutions such as media and government or from the interactional practices of everyday life. I analyze how these different levels of discourse are intricately linked, and how they together produce the social systems of gender and sexuality so foundational to human subjectivity. Central to this undertaking is my work on the language practices of groups identifying with non-normative systems of gender and sexuality in northern India, where I have been conducting ethnographic research since 1993. This research is foundational to a series of articles that I have developed with at the University of California Santa Barbara on the relationship between language and identity, a topic we recently extended to include embodied forms of meaning production. In the past several years, I have become increasingly interested in how this relationship informs contemporary US politics, whether with respect to environmental policy and activism, understandings of sociality and mental health, or discourses produced by the Trump administration. In the links to the right, I provide more detailed information about the main research areas that guide my current work.
