Middle class timelines
Ethnic humor and sexual modernity in Delhi
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2889486 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kira Hall (0000-0002-0456-4730, University of Colorado Boulder, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 48 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 491-517 |
| Publication date | 2019-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Language in Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0047-4045 • E-ISSN: 1469-8013 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0047404519000435 |
| OpenAlex | W2969779414 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 37 |
| References cited | 73 |
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
Aesthetics · Art · Literature · Middle class · Modernity · Narrative · Political science · Sociology · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Gender Studies · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South Asian Cinema and Culture
Beyond the gender binary
Minoritized Languages that Matter
Sexuality Discourses
An Anthropology of Intellectual Exchange
Rethinking the Ethnography of Communication's Conception of Value in the Context of Globalization
‘Smash this sissy boy’s mouth, Cuiguo!’
Between aunties
Say a Sentence”
I hear you like bad girls? I’m bad at everything”
Homonationalist and homocolonialist discourses in Hong Kong’s anti-extradition protests
Pow-érhuà
Humour and teasing in gay Taiwanese men’s mediatised interaction on an LGBTQ-oriented YouTube entertainment variety show
Where all my bad girls at
Coming out ‘softly’
Language, gender and sexuality in 2019
Kaur’ and ‘Singh’ reconsidered
Scissoring? I can do that!’ Play, alternative place-making and nested sexual normativities in Dutch women’s amateur football
Communing and belonging in Mumbai’s LBT scene
Itching to make an impact”
Call center timespace and working from home
Theorizing checkpoints of desire
Missouree Was Always Out of Step with Missourah”
Voicing singlish from the “middle
Figures of personhood
English and 'personality development
She will control my son
Language in the middle
Systems, features, figures
The discursive manifestation of normativities in coming-out-to-family discourses in Japanese social media
Making privilege palatable
English at the center of the periphery
HoldTight
Postcolonial Semiotics
Excluding unlaughter
Ripenglish
The Sweet Land
Uncertain Times
The Dialogic Imagination
The politics and poetics of transgression
Ethnic humor around the world
Stance
Voices of Modernity
The Sociolinguistics of Globalization
Doing Style
On HolidayA History of Vacationing
Sexuality, Obscenity, Community
The stance triangle
Rabelais and his world
Language in Late Modernity
“Go Suck Your Husband ‘s Sugarcane!”
Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life
Is the personal political? Chronotopes and changing stances toward Catalan language and identity
The Invention Of Tradition
Distinction
Rural Nostalgias and Transnational Dreams
Gendered Modernities
Black Feminist Thought
Bhangra Moves
Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis
How Many Lesbians Does It Take
The Desiring Subject
Public koti and private love
Commentary I
The Politics of Forgetting
Ontology of Fake
Performing Tourist Places
Variation and the indexical field 1
Entextualized Humor in the Formation of Scientist Identities among U.S. Undergraduates
Ordinary Icons
We Have Never Been Modern
Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
Sexual States
Queer Activism in India
Scale
Recombinant selves in mass mediated spacetime
Introduction
Large and small scale forms of personhood
Antiracist, modern selves and racist, unmodern others
Sexing diversity
East spaces in West times
Sexed signs - queering the scenery
Too Hot to Handle
Introduction
All of the above
Homonationalist discourse as a politics of pragmatic resistance in Singapore's Pink Dot movement
On Fire
If a Muslim says 'homo', nothing gets done
In a Queer Time and Place
Contemporary Linguistic Theories of Humour
Intertextual Sexuality
Say When
Gender, Language, and Modernity
Postelection surrealism and nostalgic racism in the hands of Donald Trump
The hands of Donald Trump
The living, the dead, and the immanent
Chronotopes, Scales, and Complexity in the Study of Language in Society
Mobile phones and Mipoho's prophecy
Speaking like a Model Minority
But Do Not Identify as Gay
Anthropology and its many modernities
Being Single in India
Profane Relations
Entextualization and the ends of temporality
| Unique citing works | 37 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 6,17 |
| Citation span | 2020 - 2026 (7) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 34 |