Negotiation Sexual Identity: Shifting Gender Marking among Kotis in Lucknow
This paper deals with shift in linguistic gender positions in koti discourse. Kotis are a
sexual minority in India. Kotis shift their identity and gender positions between male and koti
every now and then. They are sometimes heterosexual males living in stereotypical Indian
families and sometimes kotis living with male partners. Kotis do not cross dress so these two
aspects of shifting identity can be observed only in their linguistic practices and particularly in
the way they use gender marking in Hindi. The hypothesis of this research is that variation in
gender marking is a manifestation of shift in identity positions. This hypothesis will be supported
by both quantitative and qualitative evidence.
The data for the paper comes from ethnographic interviews conducted in Lucknow-India
in the summers of 2003, 2004 and 2005. The interviews were conducted in two formats – one to
one interviews between the researcher and the koti and focus group interviews among 3-4 kotis
in the absence of the researcher. Tokens of gender marking were extracted from the transcripts of
195 minutes and arranged in accordance with topic, gender marking used by addressee and
integration into community. A statistical analysis of 1660 tokens from across eight speakers was
conducted using VARBRUL and results of the analysis were explained using discourse analytic
perspectives. The results suggested a relationship between gender marking use and koti identity.
The results of the VARBRUL analysis also endorsed the choices of topic, addressee and
integration into community as independent variables. These factors were chosen carefully after
ethnographic fieldwork in the community. The importance of topic and addressee has also been
shown in previous research by Rickford and McNair Knox (1994). The factor group integration
into community was decided after establishing that the koti community operates like a
community of practice (Eckert 2002) and that members strongly resemble what Eckert (ibid.)
calls core and peripheral members. The core members were considered integrated into
community and the peripheral members were considered non-integrated. Hindi has two genders
– masculine and feminine. These were treated as the dependent variable.
This paper follows the methodology of Rickford and McNair Knox (ibid.), Keisling
(1998) and Schlling-Estes (2004) as far as combining qualitative and quantitative methods to
analyze variation in discourse is concerned. Most research on sexual minorities e.g., Hall (1995,
2000, 2002), Gaudio (1997), etc. focuses on the linguistic anthropological aspects of the
members of communities. In this work I use linguistic anthropological methodology to hone the
analysis of variation in koti discourse. I also highlight the correlation between social factors and
inter-speaker variation in speech and personas. The goal of this paper is to work out a way such
that (1) categories are not imposed on informants and are derived from their own understanding
of their lives (2) quantitative analysis of the data fits into the discourse analysis. The secondary
goal of the research is to prove that the theories of performativity (Hall 2003, 2005) of gender
and sexuality hold true for kotis and can be strengthened using quantitative methods.
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