Language in the middle: Class and sexuality on the Hinglish continuum

Kira Hall

This article draws from ethnographic research among youth in Delhi's expanding middle classes to call for more sociolinguistic attention to the role played by sexuality discourse in the reproduction of class relations. The discussion highlights the centrality of the middle classes to sustaining as well as shifting sexual normativity, suggesting that sexual norms are in part constituted through everyday discourses that situate middle class subjectivity between two class extremes. Specifically, the article tracks how Hinglish, as a mixed-language alternative to a class system polarized by English and Hindi, came to rival English as the preferred language of sexuality, challenging the elite censorship of “vernacular” languages that began in nineteenth-century colonialism. However, as demonstrated by two case studies of queer speakers at different ends of the Hinglish continuum, speakers of this internally diverse hybrid variety are not equally able to master the sexuality discourse that has become indexical of upward mobility.

Received: 6 November 2020 | Revised: 11 March 2021 | Accepted: 15 March 2021 DOI: 10.1111/josl.12485 THEME SERIES ARTICLE Language in the middle: Class and sexuality on the Hinglish continuum Kira Hall University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA Correspondence Kira Hall, Departments of Linguistics and Anthropology, 295 UCB, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado 80309-0295, USA. Email: [email protected] [Correction added on July 17, 2021 after first Online publication: acknowledgement section was updated] Abstract This article draws from ethnographic research among youth in Delhi's expanding middle classes to call for more sociolinguistic attention to the role played by sexuality discourse in the reproduction of class relations. The discussion highlights the centrality of the middle classes to sustaining as well as shifting sexual normativity, suggesting that sexual norms are in part constituted through everyday discourses that situate middle class subjectivity between two class extremes. Specifically, the article tracks how Hinglish, as a mixed-language alternative to a class system polarized by English and Hindi, came to rival English as the preferred language of sexuality, challenging the elite censorship of “vernacular” languages that began in nineteenth-century colonialism. However, as demonstrated by two case studies of queer speakers at different ends of the Hinglish continuum, speakers of this internally diverse hybrid variety are not equally able to master the sexuality discourse that has become indexical of upward mobility. KEYWORDS Hinglish, hybridity, India, intersectionality, middle class, normativity, profanity, sexuality discourse Journal of Sociolinguistics. 2021;25:303–323. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/josl © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd | 303 304 1 | HALL | IN T RO D U C T ION In the summer of 2019, U.S. singer and songwriter Taylor Swift released her LGBTQ + anthem “You Need to Calm Down” to coincide with Donald Trump's 73rd birthday. Although the song is designed as a critique of the Trump administration's assaults against lesbian, gay, and transgender rights, the music video takes place in a trailer park, a space ideologically associated in U.S. popular culture with the white working class.1 Analysts seeking evidence of the significance of sexuality to the American class imaginary need look no further than this video. Its humor is derived from the perceived disjuncture between this stereotypically working-class residential setting, flanked by a mountain range reminiscent of rural Appalachia, and the stylishly sexual, impeccably groomed, racially diverse, fun-loving queers who now occupy the space. As they mix fancy drinks with cheap cotton candy, ride exercise bikes on lawns of artificial grass, and sunbathe in kitschy subversions of middle-class leisure, they are confronted by the trailer park's more expected residents: toothless angry protesters in tank tops and flannel shirts holding up disapproving signs: “Homasekualty is sin!”; “Get a brain morans!” The English misspellings are consistent with the classism that animates the video, putting into graphic form a broadly held middle-class belief that the white working classes suffer from an ignorance that extends to sexuality. As Rusty Barrett (2020) outlines in his review of the role played by sexuality discourse in reproducing class inequalities, such representations emerge from a history of competing scripts that position working class identities as “lack[ing] normative sexual propriety”—whether in terms of vulgarity, promiscuity, deviance, violence, or more recently in the historical timeline, homophobia. HALL | 305 It is perhaps unusual to begin an article on the relationship between sexuality and social class in northern India with an analysis of a music video by a popular U.S. entertainer. My argument, however, is that sexuality is broadly implicated in the discursive production of class relations, far beyond the highly contextualized situations in urban Delhi that I go on to describe in this article. Although class subjectivities arise in part out of economic inequality and the material disparity it brings, the meanings that these subjectivities come to hold in everyday life are achieved in discourse. Such meanings are closely bound to the figures of personhood (Agha, 2007) that arise at class's intersection with other discourses of social difference, such as race, ethnicity, gender, geography, and sexuality. As I have recently argued with respect to middle class sexuality discourse in Delhi, these figures are often imagined through indexical relations of space and time, as seen in the urban middle class's association of rural villagers with sexual backwardness (Hall, 2019). Likewise, in Swifts’ trailer park, working-class subjectivity is imagined in the figure of a rural white man hopelessly mired in an illiterate homophobia. Both cases bring attention to the ways that social class is as much an effect of discourse as it is a demographic—a perspective central to the queer linguistic approach I develop in this article. In my discussion, I understand class as relationally produced in discourse even as material realities shape this production. My special focus on the middle classes, a notoriously difficult demographic to define in economic terms, brings into sharp relief the ways that class relations are ideologically mediated as well as materially anchored. As the final contribution to the theme series “Rethinking Class in Sociolinguistics,” this article calls for more sociolinguistic attention to the role played by sexuality discourse in the reproduction of class relations. I discuss a series of examples taken from my longitudinal ethnographic research in the 2000s among Delhi's urban middle classes, a shifting population that has undergone rapid expansion under the last three decades of liberalizing economic reforms. In my visits to a small NGO during this time of accelerated globalization (a satellite of a larger NGO focused on HIV-AIDS education), I witnessed profound changes in how language and sexuality were brought together in the constitution of class relations. The NGO’s focus on providing support for women marginalized by normative systems of gender and sexuality no doubt put sexuality on my radar as an organizing feature of class inequality, especially as the NGO brought together “help seekers” fleeing situations of violence from across the class spectrum. Yet the indexical shifts I observed at the NGO—that is, the shifts I observed in relations between linguistic form and social meaning—reflected much broader trends in the sexual valuation of English, and later Hinglish, within the expanding urban middle classes. The entry of English-medium satellite programing in the 1990s helped to enregister English as a language of sexuality by escaping the sexual censorship imposed upon Hindi-medium government programing. But this association was taken to new heights when India expanded its communications and technology industries after the turn of the century. In tandem with the growing importance of language in this globalized new economy (Heller, 2010), fluency in English-based sex talk became a distinguishing marker of a middle-class positioning situated between, on the one side, the presumed vulgarity of the lower classes, and on the other, the censoring practices of a previous generation of elites presumed to be allied with British colonial stuffiness (Hall, 2005, 2009, 2019). It was in this context that Hinglish emerged as a “sexy” youthful alternative to a class system polarized by English and Hindi. Elite registers of Hindi–English mixture have been discussed by linguists since at least the 1960s (e.g., Bhatia, 1967; Kachru, 1979), and accounts of working-class learners’ hybrids such as “Babu English,” though usually pejorative, date back to the colonial period. But it was not until the 2000s that the hybrid variety now called Hinglish, fueled by India's entertainment, media, and advertising industries, captured the popular imagination as a potentially “democratizing” form of communication that could erase the deep class divide between English- and Hindi-educated populations (e.g., Das, 2005; for a range of opinions on this point, see Kothari & 306 | HALL Snell, 2012). Commentaries expressing this vision in the English-medium press found support in a mathematical model of language competition designed by Rana D. Parshad et al. (2016), which predicted that Hinglish, as a “modern, yet localized way of speaking that is also available to the masses” (Chand, 2016), would overtake English by subsuming fluent Hindi–English bilinguals on the one side and Hindi-dominant speakers on the other. Notably, the imagining of Hinglish as promoting pan-class compatibility coincided with the expansion of India's Western-facing communications industry to include a broader range of English competences. During this transition, Hinglish became newly defined as involving the mixed varieties of the upper classes (whose English incorporates Hindi) alongside the mixed varieties of the “aspiring” lower classes (whose Hindi incorporates English).2 Certainly, the institutionalization of more hybridized spaces in cities like Delhi has changed Hindi–English relations for the better in many ways (Satyanath & Sharma, 2016). However, as Anjali Roy (2013) has argued, Hinglish speakers from Hindi-dominant backgrounds do not easily escape long-established language hierarchies and are readily “classed” by elite listeners. In this article, I view Hinglish as a continuum of Hindi–English hybridity that enables new forms of social stratification, even as its speakers idealize its unifying potential. Given the tight association of Hinglish with the middle classes, my discussion likewise highlights middle-class discourse as a critical site of sociolinguistic investigation. Specifically, I am interested in the ways “middle classness,” as a subjectivity, emerges reflexively through semiotic negation as neither working class nor elite (see also Bucholtz, 2007). This in-between status is of course central to Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) understanding of the petit bourgeoisie as a class position that distances itself from the need-driven habitus of the working class while striving to achieve the at-ease habitus of the upper bourgeoisie. It is also central to William Labov’s (1972) analysis of the lower middle class as a linguistically insecure demographic that recognizes standard prestige norms even if unable to produce them, a finding used by Bourdieu (1991) to theorize the petit bourgeoisie as “divided against themselves” (p. 83) with respect to the schemes of evaluation and production that constitute the linguistic habitus. Research by Elinor Ochs (Ochs & Schiefflin, 1984; Ochs & Taylor, 1995) and Penelope Eckert (1989) put the U.S. middle classes on the map for language and gender researchers, but many early studies of gendered speech, even when drawing participants from middle-class institutions such as universities (e.g., Cameron, 1997; Fishman, 1978; Sutton, 1995; Zimmerman & West, 1975), rarely discussed middle-class positionality as relevant to the findings. Language and gender research is not unusual in this regard: middle classness remains largely unmarked across diverse areas of sociolinguistic scholarship, much like whiteness, heterosexuality, cisnormativity, and neurotypicality. This last point regarding markedness lies behind my choice to focus this analysis of language and sexuality more specifically on middle-class discourse. It is precisely the unmarked status of the middle class, fueled by its self-fashioning as neither this nor that, which makes it the agent of sexual normativity. In queer theoretical work, normativity is conceptualized as the conditions that naturalize heterosexuality and binary gender as the unmarked norm. Here, I consider how normative understandings of gender and sexuality emerge in the unmarked discourse practices of the middle class. Ethnographers who have studied the global rise of new middle class subjectivities since the turn of the millennium have shown that the middle classes, even when constituting only a small minority of a national population as in India, play an integral role in the broader semiotics of distinction that permeate everyday social life (e.g., Fernandes & Heller, 2006; Goldstein, 2013[2003]; Heiman et al., 2012; Liechty, 2003; O’Dougherty, 2002; Ortner, 2006). In the realm of discourse, middle-class norms regarding the relationship between form and meaning—whether directed to standard language ideologies, sociolinguistic registers, race talk, youth style, digital discourse, humor, or political correctness—are readily circulated by the media and rise to prominence in the popular imaginary in ways that often reinforce existing lines of social stratification and inequality. Consider, for instance, the seemingly normative HALL | 307 middle-class practice of meeting a friend for conversation over coffee (Gaudio, 2003). Although broadly naturalized in popular U.S. culture as an activity that is free and equally available to all, even so-called “casual conversation” is economically and ideologically constrained. Likewise, middle-class youth practices such as “slut shaming,” whereby women are stigmatized for sexually promiscuous behavior, indirectly situate the middle class as the seat of sexual virtue by marking the behaviors of working class women as immoral (Barrett, 2020). The latter example reminds us that middleclass normativity is established discursively through processes of unmarking (cf. Alim et al., 2020; Barrett, 2014); simply put, it is brought into being through the marking of what is perceived to lie above and below. For this reason, its articulation will always involve other systems of social stratification, including language, race, caste, gender, and sexuality. In later sections of this article, I offer examples of the ways sexuality discourse enables this inbetween positioning, drawing on two case studies taken from my fieldwork among queer youth in Delhi's expanding middle classes. Placed side-by-side, these examples track how “middling” discourses3 came to shift sexuality's indexical ground from English to Hinglish, even while creating new exclusions in the process. My analysis seeks to demonstrate how “the language of sexuality is also a language of class” (Ortner, 2006, p. 72) by exploring the ways that middle class youth, while rejecting the elite reliance on English for sexuality discourse, also set a new hybrid norm for sex talk that demotes speakers on the Hindi side of the Hinglish continuum. Before turning to these examples, however, I set the stage by questioning the characterization of sociolinguistics as having abandoned class analysis, pointing to a robust tradition of intersectional work on class located in the field of language, gender, and sexuality. 2 | CLASS IN LANGUAGE, GENDER, AND SEXUALIT Y RESEARCH The excellent work appearing in this theme series suggests that sociolinguistics has now decisively joined what Andrew Sanchez (2018) terms “a renaissance of class analysis across the social sciences” (p. 415), a shift he views as invigorated by the economic, political, and social uncertainty that followed the 2007–2008 global financial crisis. This follows a period described by many applied linguists and sociolinguists (including authors in this series) as moving away from an early concentration on class analysis (e.g., Block, 2014; Rampton, 2010; Tupas, 2019), as once seen in the work of scholars like William Labov, Peter Trudgill, and Basil Bernstein, among many others. Without question, sociolinguistics would benefit from more research incorporating class analysis. In my own field of language, gender, and sexuality, this direction is made more pressing by the global rise of dangerous “anti-gender” far-right campaigns that exploit class inequality to advance misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic discourses (see, e.g., Barát, 2021; Borba, 2019a; Borba et al., 2020; Gal, 2021; Kosse, 2019). Yet from my own vantage point within this field, class analysis has remained very much alive—a reflex, perhaps, of the historical concern across first- and second-wave feminisms with labor issues (see Ferguson et al., 2019 for a review), coupled with late 20th century feminist concerns in U.S. academia with gender inequality as mutually constituted by inequalities of class and/or race (e.g., Anzaldúa, 1987; Crenshaw, 1991; Davis, 1983; Ehrenreich, 1983; hooks, 1984; Stanworth, 1984). Early work by Susan Gal (1978, 1989) on the place of gender in the political economy of language and by Eckert (1989) on the intersection of gender and class styles in a Detroit high school set these feminist concerns into motion for language and gender researchers, establishing the study of class as inseparable from that of gender. 308 | HALL Importantly, Gal and Eckert both made use of ethnography's key method of participant observation to analyze class as a lived relation,4 uncovering the tight imbrication of materialist and symbolic aspects of economic inequality in everyday life. In this context, I suggest that the academic turn to poststructuralist concepts of performativity in the late 1990s, while often critiqued as a locus of class erasure, in fact motivated ethnographers of language and gender to give even more attention to the ways class is constituted in discourse, although always in coarticulation with other dimensions of social life such as gender, race, and sexuality. Turn-of-the-century work coming out of this tradition extends Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet's (1992) understanding of class as locally constituted in specific contexts, whether in assembly-line talk by female Portuguese immigrant workers in a Canadian factory (Goldstein, 1995), the use of middle-class white women's language by African American drag queens in Texas gay bars (Barrett, 1999), or the everyday code-switching practices of rural New Mexican Chicanas (Gonzales Valásquez, 1995; other important intersectional research on North American contexts during this period includes Jacobs-Huey, 2006; Lanehart, 2009; Mallinson, 2006; Mendoza-Denton, 2008; Morgan, 2002; Zentella, 1997). Why, then, is this ethnographic tradition so often overlooked in reviews of the purported decline of class-based research in sociolinguistics? In the most recent contribution to this theme series, Adrienne Lo (2020) offers one possible answer, reminding us that our understandings of social inequalities such as class and race—as structural or agentive, material or ideological, categorical or performative— emerge from disciplinary histories that both enable and limit our analytic imaginings. At the end of her essay, she reflects on how our perspectives on class might change if we were to move beyond the “Language and X” paradigm that has fractured sociolinguistics into isolated subfields. Within my own subfield of “Language and Gender,” much like Lo's subfield of “Language and Race,” class is understood as meaningful only in articulation with other dimensions of social life. As Sherry Ortner (2006) describes with respect to “the hidden life of class” in U.S. high schools, class is often “‘displaced’ or ‘spoken through’ other languages of social difference” (p. 72). As such, it may sometimes not look like class at all to researchers expecting an isolatable analytic. In his review of the “retreat” of class in British sociolinguistics, Ben Rampton (2010) suggests that North American intersectional research does not transition well to the UK, “where class and race are more easily separated” (p. 11). However, for those taking a feminist intersectional approach, class can never be productively analyzed as “spoken in its own right” (Rampton, 2010, p. 11), quite simply because its articulation never sounds the same across nations, contexts, communities, and even individual interactions (for a range of recent perspectives on intersectionality in language and sexuality research, see Cornelius, 2020; Cornelius & Barrett, 2020; Chun & Walters, 2021; Ferrada, 2021; Gray & Cooke, 2018; Lane, 2019; Levon, 2015; Steele, forthcoming; Washington, 2020). After the turn of the millennium, ethnographers of language, gender, and sexuality working in various parts of the world joined cultural anthropologists in giving attention to the structuring effects of globalization on everyday life, as illustrated, for example, by articles appearing in Bonnie McElhinny’s (2007) pathbreaking compilation of ethnographic work on economies in global transition. In the 2000s too, class analysis in this tradition remained very much alive, even if reformulated within the interrelated 21st century terms of neoliberalism (Inoue, 2006), language commodification (Cameron, 2000; Heller, 2007), consumption and branding (Bucholtz, 2007; Gaudio, 2003), cosmopolitanism (Zhang, 2005), and transnationalism (Besnier, 2004; Hall, 2009; Philips, 2007). Many scholars have taken issue with Ulrich Beck’s (2002) characterization of class as a “zombie category” that has outlived its relevance, including Tupas in this theme series. But I read Beck's use of this metaphor somewhat differently: as expressing concern that traditional understandings of class in the social sciences do not adequately capture “the rapidly changing realities inside the nation-state containers, and outside as well” (p. 24). Accordingly, studies of the global economy may not use the established HALL | 309 terms recognized by sociolinguists as constitutive of class analysis, but they powerfully describe the lived experience of inequality within globalization's destabilizing structures. To take Beck's metaphor further, such studies illustrate that class still walks among us, even if in a distorted form that may not be easily recognized. Those of us conducting longitudinal ethnographic work within local communities are acutely aware that nation-based hierarchies of class do not die easily. Beck's “rapidly changing realities” are readily subordinated to more enduring structures of socioeconomic inequality, especially given uncertainties regarding what counts as linguistic capital in the global economy (Hall, 2014; Park, 2014). The “rethinking” of class by authors appearing in this theme series, in my reading, lies precisely in this tension between enduring and changing structures. This is the tension that Anthony Giddens (1981) addressed in his work on “the duality of structure”: the idea that structures, as “both the medium and the outcome of the practices which constitute social systems” (p. 27), constrain as well as enable human agency. Ruanni Tupas (2019), who published early on in the series, calls for more attention to enduring structures. He makes the important point that studies of the stratifying role played by English under capitalist globalization must be more attentive to the legacy of colonialism. Using Filipino call centers as an example, he reminds us that access to the promise of English—or rather, to the particular variety of English that is prioritized in the global service industry—is limited to those who are already benefitting from the hierarchy of “unequal Englishes” induced by colonial systems of education. Felix Banda (2020), focusing on Kenya and Zambia, similarly describes how the colonialist mapping of class onto urban and rural geographies still lives on in 21st century development work, as seen, for instance, in exchanges between Western-educated English-speaking elites and Dholuospeaking villagers. However, Banda also warns against the dangers of representing the lower classes as “perpetually condemned” (p. 14), suggesting that one of the best ways to understand the structural conditions of inequality is to analyze how “social class signals,” such as elite uses of English, are contested by the groups they marginalize. Finally, Christian W. Chun (2019), whose work is closely allied with Lo’s (2020) contribution discussed above, calls for more attention to changing structures, focusing on how the contours of class shift across contextualized interaction. Chun is specifically interested in the “interanimation” of class with other social processes that may not readily be seen as related to capitalist subjectivity, such as race. Calling for a performative understanding of class as “dynamically shaped by situational contexts” (p. 333), he cautions against static models of intersectionality that anticipate the shape of its materialization in discourse, since categories of identity will necessarily be prioritized differently across interactional contexts (see also Chun & Walters, 2021). My analysis builds on the work of these colleagues to describe how the middle class contains within it this very tension between enduring and changing structures. What is intriguing about the middle class, from a sociolinguistic standpoint, is that even as it is the seat of norms for the broader population, it also appears to be the demographic that is most responsible for shifting those norms. Normativity is often portrayed in queer theory as an unchanging hegemony against which queerness emerges (for a critique, see Wiegman, 2012), but ever-shifting indexical orders ensure that normativity is in fact multiple and always on the move (Hall, 2013, 2019). Ethnographers working within the tradition of queer linguistics have put this diversity at the forefront of analysis, examining the ways that “normativities” are constructed at the local level even as they reproduce the broader, hegemonic norms that are the ground of queer theory. The importance of the middle classes in instigating movement in normativity is suggested by research on both language and sexual norms, with change appearing to “spread from the middle class outward” (Barrett, 2020, citing Labov, 1996 and Foucault, 1978). These shifts constitute the heart of my investigation, as I seek to understand how the middle classes can be both norm-sustaining and norm-breaking. Part of the answer lies in the tension between old and new middle-class formations 310 | HALL that continue to develop as economies expand to meet the demands of late capitalism, leading in some contexts to what anthropologists have identified as “dueling middle classes” (Heiman et al., 2012). This polarization can be found in Delhi, where a middle class empowered by new centers of global finance has bumped up against a traditional middle class based in state-driven, bureaucratic economic policies. That said, the bifurcation between old and new has become “real” largely through its dramatization in film and media, suggesting that this construction too is ideological. After all, the expanding middle classes in global metropoles across the world, by their very diversity, are inherently much more than two. Perhaps a better answer to the question of how the middle classes both sustain and shift normativity lies again in that peculiar in-between positioning discussed by Bourdieu (1984), whereby the middle classes define themselves against elites while also situating themselves as “above the masses” (on elitist stancetaking, see Thurlow & Jaworski, 2011). In other words, even if middle classness is in many senses enabled by economics, it is ultimately an ideological positioning that emerges through distinction from higher and lower class positions. By investigating how speakers go about locating themselves in a middle ground, we can learn much about the lived reality of class (for relevant case studies, see Bucholtz, 2007; Dong, 2018; Khoo, 2019; Lane, 2019; Mapes & Ross, 2020; Marrese, 2019; Reyes, 2017; Ting, 2019; Urciuoli, 1993; Zhang, 2018). For instance, in postcolonial contexts such as India, which involve class systems that continue to prioritize the colonizer's language, middling practices often exemplify the “ambivalence and authority” that Homi K. Bhabha (1985) made central to the theorization of hybridity in postcolonial studies. This is seen in the promiscuous citationality of English as a vector of distinction: speakers may in one context appropriate English to parody the cosmopolitan pretensions of their peers (as in Nakassis’s, 2016 work on Tamil-speaking youth) and in another to assert themselves as more cosmopolitan than the masses (as in Singh’s, 2020 work on the anti-racist discourses of ethnically marked hip-hop artists). Similarly, within the array of queer identities in India, English plays a central role in distinguishing newer gay and lesbian sexual identities from more traditional gender-variant identities such as hijras and kotis. My earlier work on the intersectionality of sexuality and class in Delhi revealed how kotis, denigrated in popular discourse as “fake hijras,” assert their sexuality as a preferred alternative between two extremes by parodying the English of upper-class gay men as “prudish” and the Hindi of lower-class hijras as “vulgar” (Hall, 2005), a distinction also relevant to the two case studies I present below. In all of these examples, the creation of a “resistant” discursive middle ground inevitably constitutes new forms of exclusion, even exemplifying in some contexts the emergence of what Angela Reyes (2017), writing about colonial recursivity in the Philippines, calls “middle-class elite” subjectivities. As I pivot to my two case studies of sexuality discourse in middle-class Delhi, I should say a few words about caste, the hereditary system of social stratification that exists independently of class but is intimately intertwined with its political economy. By the time of my fieldwork, much scholarly writing had put the question of caste representation to the test: “Does the exaggerated focus on caste serve to keep India in a recursive abyss of anti-modernity?” Anthropologists, among many other social scientists, began to think outside of caste in order to newly represent contemporary India. Yet these reframings often mirrored what David Mosse (2019) has described as the market economy's erasure of caste identity as antithetical to modernity. Perhaps for related reasons, caste was not talked about openly by the middle class youth I knew in Delhi, unless it was mentioned in order to be dismissed. As a result, I have been reluctant to discuss caste in my own work, sensing that it was something that my research participants did not want me to include. My close friend and co-director of the NGO, Nanhi,5 occasionally spoke of her “fierceness as a Rajput,” but this was done to show her willingness to be involved in the long fight against social injustice rather than to re-instantiate “Rajputness” as a frozen place in a vertical caste system. Nanhi offered her home to help-seekers from the lower castes but did | HALL 311 not like to speak directly of their caste backgrounds, unless this information mattered to filing a report. Likewise, for the help-seekers whose survival was dependent on “modern” spaces of acceptance, caste talk was something that happened elsewhere, in the rural areas, among less modern subjects, and in an India they had come to reject as standing in the way of their quest for alternative identities. As M.S.S. Pandian (2002) put it in his analysis of upper-caste autobiographies, it was as if “to talk about caste as caste would incarcerate one into a pre-modern realm” (p. 1735). However, as Pandian also notes, speakers who mark caste practices as belonging to others inscribe their own upper-caste practices “silently” as the unmarked norm. The dangers of this unmarking process can be seen in the discourses of dominant-caste LGBTQ activists, who have put into motion a queer reframing of Hinduism that erases the violence wrought by its oppressive caste structures (Upadhyay, 2020). Although I do not have the space to integrate this idea fully into my discussion of sexuality discourse, the parallels between caste and class identification should remind us of the power of an unmarked category that defines itself through what it is not. This observation backgrounds my presentation of two case studies of Delhi youth: the first involving a bisexual cisgender woman who challenges elitist restrictions on sexuality discourse by cursing in Hindi; the second involving a transgender man struggling to convince the medical establishment of his worthiness for gender confirmation surgery. While the protagonists in both narratives loosely belong to Delhi's expanding middle classes and are speakers of a hybrid variety popularly characterized as Hinglish, they are not equally able to master the sexuality discourse that has become indexical of upward mobility. 3 | DELHI ' S NEW BEHAN CHOD The main point to make before presenting my first case study is that the use of Hindi for sexuality discourse has long been viewed as contentious by Hindi–English bilinguals in urban India. The avoidance of Hindi for sexual domains within this demographic can be traced back to the elite purging of sex-related vocabulary from Indian print “vernaculars” that began in nineteenth-century colonialism and was later taken up by elite Indian nationalists (see, e.g., Gupta, 2001; for an overview of censorship practices in South Asia, see Mazzarella & Kaur, 2009). The contemporary practice of using English in sexuality discourse—whether for sexual intimacy, sexual practice, sexual identity, sexualized body parts, or sexual profanity—is thus an enduring legacy of colonialism, reflecting deep histories of institutionalized censorship across literary, educational, and popular textual domains. By the time I began my fieldwork in 2001, the bifurcation of Hindi and English across lines of sexuality discourse had become a distinctive marker of the emerging globalized middle classes (cf. Puri, 1999). Even speakers of densely hybrid varieties of Hindi–English mixture, now popularly understood as Hinglish, used English-derived lexical items for sexual domains in highly predictable ways.6 This was particularly salient at my research site, an NGO whose stated mission was to provide educational information about sexuality to women marginalized by heterosexual normativity. Volunteers often questioned how they could best discuss sexuality with the lower classes when Hindi lacked terms for body parts like “breast,” “vagina,” and “penis”—a vocabulary divide often noted in HIV-AIDS research on India (e.g., Lambert, 2001).Yet Hindi does have these terms, as I later learned from kotis in the same NGO building, who effortlessly reeled off long lists of Hindi lexemes for each of these body parts. The perception of Hindi as lacking this vocabulary was thus ultimately ideological: speakers in the globalizing middle classes, particularly women, heard these terms not as neutral terminology but as vulgar profanity, categorizing them together with profane insults like “behan chod” (sister fucker) and “madar chod” (mother fucker) as “lower class language.” This was reflected in the way my more daring interviewees would nervously whisper these terms into the 312 | HALL microphone “for research purposes only,” making me promise that I would never share the recording with anyone, ever. For these middle-class speakers, the language of sexuality was very much the language of class. The situation I confronted when I returned to the NGO in 2008 was hardly recognizable as the Delhi I knew in 2001, with the middle classes now significantly expanded to meet global demands of the city's Western-facing communications industry. It was in this context that I met Sonia, a firstgeneration English-medium college student who had been the victim of vicious Internet rumors surrounding her bisexual identity. Sonia's everyday Hinglish was comfortably situated on the English side of the Hinglish continuum. In our first meeting, she introduced herself as Delhi's “New Behan Chod,” claiming as her own a misogynist taboo term that Indian feminists had targeted in their platforms for decades. She was not the “behan” (sister) of yesterday's feminism, she explained, but rather the “behan chod” (sister fucker) of a new 21st century feminism demanding equality in language. I later came to learn that what Sonia described as her “very good vocabulary in gaalis” was representative of a much broader youth trend in Mumbai and Delhi (“gaali” is the Hindi term for “abusive language”), the origins of which, somewhat ironically, could be traced to educated urban youth employed in transnational communications for their English skills.7 Delhi journalists were fascinated with the practice, publishing daily articles on the growing popularity of “BC-MC” language, an acronym taken from the register's two most notorious insults. In Sonia's view, Hindi swearwords functioned as “stress-busters” to relieve the pressures of living in a global economy, iconized for her in the everyday verbal abuse that call center employees had to endure from English speakers in the West. The symbolic value ascribed to the register by a new generation of middle-class youth thus arose in part from the relational inequality inherent to transnational service work. In Delhi's new global economy, the nationally prestigious English of northern Indian elites had been “re-classed” as inferior by North American and European interlocutors. What better way to talk back to global power than to curse in one's mother tongue? Still, the sexist residue that lingered on in these taboo terms made it impossible for the women of Sonia's generation to embrace them fully as their own. Unlike their male colleagues, young women's use of BC-MC language was projected as much against male power as it was elite power. On the one hand, they performed the register as a form of feminist refusal, rejecting the elitist censoring of sexual expression placed on a previous generation of Indian women. But they also recognized the register's deeply misogynistic roots, which for them, as for the elites who came before them, were located in the lower classes. Herein lies the paradox: although Sonia and her friends viewed their Hindi rebellion as allied with Hindi-dominant speakers (evidenced by their admiring praise of “real” BC-MC users in less affluent areas of Delhi), they also felt compelled to distinguish themselves from those same speakers. A prominent strategy for creating this distinction was to intellectualize the register by interrogating its etymological roots, as Sonia does below in a conversation with myself and Nanhi, the NGO co-director. This discussion was not provoked in any direct way: Sonia frequently turned the conversation back to her expertise in Hindi profanity. Here, she recalls two swearwords circulating on a popular recording posted to YouTube of a young urban professional woman cussing out her boyfriend in Hinglish. Example 1: “It's like an oxymoron” Sonia, May 2008 (English is in standard font, Hindi in italics) HALL | 313 Example 2: “Dude, I’m not a chuṭiyā, I’m a cesarean” Sonia, May 2008 (English is in standard font, Hindi in italics) In both examples, Sonia locates herself in the middle ground of class relations by deploying a censored vernacular sexual register (showing that she is not elite) while also making it clear that she is not the register's usual user (showing that she is not lower class). Her metalinguistic speculations on the meanings of bahan kā lauḍā (sister fucker) and chuṭiyā (pussy) are consistent with what some commentators came to call “gaaliology” (e.g., Choudhury, 2010), a Hinglish term highlighting the studied nature of women's cursing. In Example 1, Sonia points to the “incorrect language” of the insult term bahan kā lauḍā (sister fucker), countering Nanhi's more mainstream translation of the term by parsing its components into bahan kā (sister's) and lauḍā (penis). “It's like an oxymoron,” she explains, how can a sister have a penis? In Example 2, she tells a joke that depends on a folk etymology of chuṭiyā (pussy) as consisting of the base morpheme chuṭ (pussy) plus the Sanskrit ablative case ending -yā (from). With the term of abuse redefined as “from the pussy” instead of “pussy,” she is able to deliver the signature punchline that she was known for at college: “If someone calls you a chuṭiyā you say, “Dude, I’m not a chuṭiyā, I’m a cesarean!” (i.e., Dude, I’m not from the pussy, I’m from a cesarean). Framed as a cheeky response to a sexual insult, the joke is funny because it elevates a vulgar Hindi slang term for “pussy” as parallel to an English term belonging to an elite Hindi-English medical register. The latter example makes visible the ways that sexuality discourse in urban India is also a discourse of class. Most pointedly, the parallelism between chuṭiyā and cesarean highlights the language-based divide 314 | HALL in sexuality discourse that has long been used by the upper classes as a vector of distinction. The joke is classist, deriving its humor from the “consciously citational” (Orsini, 2015, p. 201) incorporation of a vulgar Hindi located elsewhere. Even Sonia's delivery of the punchline—first mainly in Hindi and then mainly in English (with the second instance directed to me, a Hindi language learner who did not get the joke the first time around)—demonstrates a versatility across the Hinglish continuum that situates her as an elite speaker. However, this is also a feminist joke, enacting a savvy young woman (notice the globally cool, youthinflected address term dude) who is not afraid to defend herself against male aggression. In this sense, Sonia's fluency in Hindi profanity distinguishes her from a former generation of elite Hindi–English bilinguals who lack the Hindi competence to respond to this kind of verbal abuse (on “Hindi insecurity” among New Delhi elites, see Chand, 2011). Sonia is not lower class, but she is also not elite. With these kinds of middling tactics, urban college women in Sonia's generation emerge in the center of two class extremes. They contest upper class forms of censorship by appropriating profanity associated with the lower classes, but they use that profanity in ways that locate them as superior to “real” users. 4 | JA NA M A N D T HE GOOD D OCTOR My second case study presents a view of sexuality discourse from the Hindi side of the Hinglish continuum, calling into question visions of Hinglish as having the potential to break down class barriers. It involves a young transgender man whose interactions with an English-prioritizing medical establishment failed in part because of his disfluency in the hybrid Hindi–English medical register that constitutes the punchline of Sonia's joke (see Kachru, 1979 for an early sociolinguistic account of this register). Janam's story is more complicated than I can relate here, but suffice it to say that a few months after arriving at the NGO with his girlfriend to escape death threats, he decided to pursue gender confirmation surgery at an upscale hospital in Delhi that had established a reputation for this procedure. Although Janam had worked as a journalist for a Hindi newspaper before coming to Delhi and spoke a variety of Hindi that occasionally incorporated English lexemes, his Hinglish was clearly reflective of an upbringing in Hindi-medium schools, not English-medium schools, an educational divide central to tensions over middle-class status in northern India (LaDousa, 2014; see also Bhatt, 2005 on India's “English-linguistic apartheid”). As shown here, this divide also became consequential to Janam's ability to navigate Hinglish conversations at the hospital. Consistent with conversational practices in the broader population of urban elite bilinguals, physicians' discourse about gender and sexuality was mainly articulated in English. The hospital had initiated the development of its now robust gender confirmation surgery program in 2003. Dr. Mehta, an entrepreneurial Indian-educated urologist, came up with the idea after founding the hospital's male sexual health clinic. True to his local reputation as a progressive urologist eager to stay on the cutting edge of sexual health, Dr. Mehta organized an all-star cast consisting of himself, two psychiatrists, a psychologist, an endocrinologist, and two surgeons. In 2005, he oversaw the program's first gender confirmation surgical procedure involving a transgender man, an accomplishment that produced a limited but applauding reaction in the Delhi English-medium press. By the time I met Dr. Mehta in 2009, his program had performed a total of 90 surgeries; Janam hoped to be the 91st. When I accompanied Janam to his intake interview, I realized the impossibility of what lay before him. Dr. Mehta had advertised his program as serving patients across the class spectrum, but when we explicitly asked him to speak in Hindi, he responded with a register of Hinglish that was impossible for Janam to understand. HALL | 315 As seen in Example 3, Dr. Mehta used Hindi to emphasize the importance of the medical information he was about to relay (“This is the most important thing”; “This is the first thing you should understand”), but he then used English almost exclusively to impart that “important” information, including vital details regarding uncertainties associated with this “multi-stage” and “multi-year” process. His use of English to describe the process is consistent with the historical use of English in Indian medicine as the preferred language of science, a practice that continues to have consequences for Hindi-dominant speakers seeking access to advanced medical services. But it also reflects enduring elitist ideologies regarding English as the appropriate language for sexuality discourse. Indeed, Dr. Mehta's reputation as a caring, progressive physician in many ways depends on his use of English in sexual domains, given that the use of Hindi in this discourse context, for many in the urban middle classes, would be heard as vulgar. The effects on Janam were consequential. With his comprehension limited to a few Hindi snippets, as seen in the boxes to the right in Example 3 (even these involve English lexemes), it was impossible for Janam to pass even the lowest bar of informed consent. Unlike Sonia in the previous case study, who ranges over the Hinglish continuum in her twice-told punchline, Janam and Dr. Mehta appear unable to move beyond its poles.8 Example 3: “This is the most important thing” Janam, Intake Interview, November 2009 (English is in standard font, Hindi in italics) The most serious obstacle to Janam's success, however, was ultimately not comprehension; the NGO was willing and able to provide translators if requested. Rather, Janam's ability to express his psychological 316 | HALL and financial readiness for the transition was constrained by broader gendered language ideologies. Sociolinguists have discussed the discriminatory practice by which transgender clients are required to construct inauthentic narratives in order to pass the now global diagnostic criteria used for the identification of a “true transexual” (Borba, 2019b; see also Zimman, 2020). In Janam's case, this requirement was additionally complicated by the expectation that this narrative would be in English. Like many in the Hindi-dominant aspiring middle classes, Janam associated English with an elite, bureaucratic femininity, viewing Hindi as uniquely suited to his masculine presentation of self. Yet before he could receive the green light for surgery, he had to attend a number of psychiatry sessions designed to evaluate both his psychological commitment to living as a man and his financial commitment to a life-long regime of hormone replacement therapy. For Janam, this created a conflict: if he were to express the authentic masculinity required by the psychiatrist, his use of Hindi would situate him in a class of speakers viewed by the medical establishment as incapable of the necessary psychological introspection and financial commitment. Janam's solution for confronting the psychologist was to model his speech after the Hinglish of Dr. Mehta, achieving a middle ground that would allow him to express his masculinity while also sounding educated. In Example 4, he offers his practiced reply to the psychiatrist's introductory question, “What can I do for you?” Example 4: “What can I do for you?” Janam, Psychiatric Interview, November 2009 (English is in standard font, Hindi in italics) If this excerpt is characteristic of what transpired in the remainder of Janam's meetings with the psychiatrist, it is likely that his labored use of a limited set of English lexemes (help, facility, okay, sex change) revealed more about his class positionality than the use of monolingual Hindi may have revealed. After a few more weeks of struggling to articulate his male authenticity in English, Janam discontinued his meetings with the psychiatrist. Shortly after this meeting was recorded, I left Delhi for the United States and do not have access to the exchanges that followed, but I often wonder why Janam made the decision to withdraw from the program. Was it Dr. Mehta's description of multiple operations stretching across years only to result in imperfection? Or was it Janam's disfluency in the elite registers of sexuality discourse brought into focus by these examples? Either way, whether his reasons were material or symbolic, the outcome would have been the same: Janam abandoned his life-long dream of gender affirmation. 5 | CO NC LUS ION S In the mid-2000s, when anthropological research on the global middle classes was at its height, Leela Fernandes and Patrick Heller (2006) argued that India's “New Middle Class” should be understood as a “class-in-practice”—that is, “as a class defined by its politics and the everyday practices through | HALL 317 which it reproduces its privileged position” (p. 495). In this article, I have demonstrated how this reproduction, noted for middle classes everywhere, relies on processes of unmarking: middle classness is a relational subjectivity that emerges through the marking of what it is not. I have further suggested that the everyday use of sexuality discourse to achieve this unmarking contributes to the normativity that is the target of queer theoretical critique. The marking of other classes as sexually abnormal—for instance, as “prudish” or “vulgar”—delimits the range of what is acceptable for the middle classes. Finally, I have made use of longitudinal ethnography to show the processual nature of middle class normativity in the context of urban India. The analysis of interactions across time reveals how Delhi youth, to challenge elite forms of sexual censorship, shifted sexuality's ground from English to Hinglish, even as they reconstituted class hierarchy across a new continuum of Hindi–English hybrids. The intersectionality of class with other dimensions of social life is what gives class its staying power: it is easily displaced onto other discourses in ways that disguise its stratifying effects. After I finished my fieldwork in 2009, Hinglish became more broadly enregistered as the sexy new language of India's expanding middle classes. This revision is seen in the Hindi blockbuster reality television show Bigg Boss, now headed for its 15th season, in which celebrity contestants on the English side of the Hinglish continuum can speak elite forms of Hinglish freely but are penalized, and at times even dismissed, for speaking monolingual English (Sheeraz & Hall, 2017; cf. Parshad et al., 2016). It is also thematic to a viral advertising campaign for the snack bar Nestlé Munch, in which a flirtatious yet insecure young man located on the Hindi side of the Hinglish continuum, after being rejected by a series of women for his “broken English,” takes a bite of the bar and is magically transformed into a sexy, confident, Hinglish-singing film star.9 In both of these media examples, Hinglish is sexualized as a middle ground—neither elite nor vernacular—that will appeal to an expanding middle class made of speakers on both sides of the continuum. Hybrid language varieties like Hinglish have often been interpreted as transgressive by sociolinguists (though see Catedral, 2021), particularly when spoken by youth cultures in nationalist contexts that prioritize linguistic purity. Certainly, the hybrid practices discussed throughout this article challenge enduring colonialist and nationalist legacies by shifting the ground of sexuality discourse from English to Hinglish. Yet hybridity is never the end of the story, even when it is overtly positioned against language norms that uphold social stratification. After all, the sexuality discourses used by Sonia to assert her progressive middle classness are the same sexuality discourses that undermined Janam's ability to acquire medical support. In sum, the central role played by the middle classes in the politics of sexual normativity calls for more sociolinguistic attention, as does the role of sexuality discourse in sustaining and promoting class inequalities. 6 | ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Insights conveyed in this article arose from important conversations with participants in my 2019 CU Boulder seminar “Language and the Middle Class” (Molly Hamm, Velda Khoo, Maureen Kosse, Rebecca Lee, Olivia Hirschey Marrese, Tammy Matthews, Alexandra Romanova, Kim Strong, Andrew Ting, Amanda Rose Villarreal) and with audiences at Georgetown, Penn State, San Diego State, and University of the Aegean. I am grateful to Monica Heller and Joseph Sung-Yul Park for crucial editorial interventions; to editorial assistant Lalbiaktluangi Chhakchhuak and the Wiley team for their careful attention to the paper; to Mie Hiramoto, Shobha Satyanath, and Jaspal Singh for vital contacts; to Ashima Khanna, Aparna Shukla, Shashi Jain (Gail India Limited), Sujata Passi, and Ved Prakash Vatuk for translation and transcription support; to the physicians at the Delhi hospital for allowing me to conduct interviews and record their interactions with Janam; and to many colleagues 318 | HALL for instrumental feedback on various aspects of the paper, including Rusty Barrett, Rodrigo Borba, Elaine Chun, Jacob Henry, Adrienne Lo, Costas Nakassis, Angie Reyes, Lal Zimman, two anonymous reviewers, and my brilliant everyday interlocutor, Donna Goldstein. Finally, I thank my friends in Delhi for sharing their lives with me and offering critical insights on the data presented here, most especially Nanhi, Sonia, and Janam. DATA AVAILABILIT Y STATEMENT The data excerpts included in this article are obtained from confidential interviews and are not publicly available. ORCID Kira Hall https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0456-4730 ENDNOTES 1 Taylor Swift's video “You Need to Calm Down,” which premiered June 17, 2019, can be viewed on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkk9gvTmCXY. At the time of this writing (April 17, 2021), the video had been viewed 244,871,077 times. 2 This definition provides a simplistically polarized portrait of the sociolinguistic diversity associated with Hindi– English mixture. My use of the term Hinglish through this article reflects its ideological construction in popular descriptions such as these and is not meant to suggest the existence of a singular, unified, or systematic language variety; I thank Suresh Canagarajah for bringing this to my attention. Popular descriptions of Hinglish as involving (only) Hindi and English also tend to erase the dense involvement of other north Indian languages, such as Punjabi, Urdu, and Bengali. For instance, many of the abuse terms discussed in the third section of this article are understood as Punjabi-derived. 3 In her work on Mock Spanish, Hill (1995) draws from Cmiel (1991) to define “middling style” as a kind of plain speaking that blurs the rhetorical boundary between public and private discourse. My use of the term “middling” in this article focuses more specifically on the navigation of class hierarchy. 4 On ethnography as a key approach in the study of language, gender, and sexuality, see Gaudio (2019); Hall et al. (2021); and Hall & Davis (2021). 5 I have used pseudonyms for all research participants cited in this article. 6 The feedback I received from Hindi–English bilinguals in Delhi to the Hindi translation of this article's abstract exemplifies this patterning. As they reported to me, “no one” would ever use Hindi for terms such as “sexual” and “sexuality.” However, the prolific Hindi poet, folklorist, and essayist who assisted with the translation, Ved Prakash Vatuk, readily suggested the terms laiṅgik for “sexual” and laiṅgiktā for “sexuality.” Although these terms are often perceived as stilted, archaic, or even pejorative by urban middle-class speakers, they are regularly used in the Hindi-medium press to narrate same-sex sexuality, as in the collocations samlaiṅgik (homosexual) and samlaiṅgik sambandh (same-sex relation). I have rendered the abstract in Hindi instead of Hinglish to highlight this ideological divide. 7 For a provocative account of the rise of politicized “gaali cultures” on social media, see Udupa (2018). 8 I thank Costas Nakassis for his astute feedback on the relationship between these two examples. 9 The Nestlé Munchification video can be viewed on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwZxo X57WcY. Last accessed April 17, 2021. R E F E R E NC E S Agha, A. (2007). Language and social relations. Cambridge University Press. Alim, H. S., Reyes, A., & Kroskrity, P. V. (2020). The field of language and race: A linguistic anthropological approach to race, racism, and racialization. In H. S. Alim, A. Reyes, & P. V. Kroskrity (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of language and race (pp. 1–21). Oxford University Press. HALL | 319 Anzaldúa, G. E. (1987). Borderlands-La Frontera: The new mestiza. Aunt Lute Books. Banda, F. (2020). 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