Boys’ Talk: Hindi, Moustaches and Masculinity in New Delhi

Abstract

Since the 1990s, scholars working within the area of language and gender have increasingly considered the ways in which masculinity informs and structures everyday language practice. While the paradigms that frame scholarship on language and masculinity differ, with early studies focusing on differences between men’s talk and women’s talk (e.g., Johnstone 1990; Tannen 1990) and later studies seeking to explain how men’s talk is produced performatively through appeal to ideologies of gendered language (e.g., Cameron 1997), the research has left us with a trove of data regarding linguistic possibilities for the enactment of masculinity. Whether explicating the homophobic story-telling strategies of male friends in Britain (Coates 2007), the use of sentence-final particles by white-collar Japanese men (SturtzSreetharan 2006), or employments of the address term dude among American college-aged men (Kiesling 2004), linguistic research on masculinity has decisively demonstrated that ‘maleness’ is as much gained as it is given, with speakers reproducing, and often exploiting, ideological links between form and meaning in the production of a gendered subjectivity. The burgeoning body of literature on women’s appropriation of purportedly masculine forms of discourse has offered a kind of proof for this theoretical position, establishing the floating and hence endlessly flexible nature of the linguistic sign (e.g., Queen 2005; Matsumoto 2002; Tetreault 2002; McElhinny 1995).

This article includes excerpts from a much longer, as yet unpublished, manuscript entitled ‘Masculinity under Fire in New Delhi.’ I am very grateful to the editors of this volume, Pia Pichler and Eva Eppler, for their encouragement and insightful suggestions. I am especially pleased that they have put together this collection in honor of Jen Coates, whom I have long admired for her pioneering work in the field of language and gender and especially in the area of language and masculinity. I am also indebted to a number of friends, students and colleagues who have helped me think through various ideas expressed in this chapter, particularly Mary Bucholtz, Donna Goldstein, Chaise LaDousa, Sujata Passi, Joshua Raclaw, Betu Singh and Ved Vatuk. Above all, I would like to offer my heartfelt thanks to the lesbians and boys who agreed to participate in this study, and who gave me many months of unforgettable Delhi-style fun.