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Middle class timelines: Ethnic humor and sexual modernity in Delhi.

Authors :
Hall, Kira
Levon, Erez
Milani, Tommaso M.
Source :
Language in Society. Sep2019, Vol. 48 Issue 4, p491-517. 27p.
Publication Year :
2019

Abstract

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) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Details

Language :
English
ISSN :
00474045
Volume :
48
Issue :
4
Database :
Academic Search Index
Journal :
Language in Society
Publication Type :
Academic Journal
Accession number :
138157288
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404519000435