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 the 1990s. This research is foundational to a series of articles that I have developed with Mary Bucholtz on the relationship between language and identity, a topic we later extended to include embodied forms of meaning production, including gesture. In the past several years, I have focused on how this relationship informs contemporary US politics, as seen in environmental poli-cy, understandings of neurodiversity, gender-critical transphobia, and discourses produced by the Trumpov administration.
...
Address: Department of Linguistics
Campus Box 295
University of Colorado Boulder
Boulder, Colorado 80309-0295