ABSTRACT
I study a community of men who self-identify as janana and have sex with men on the streets of Lucknow, India. Jananas (also called kotis, Hall 2005) occupy liminal spaces in the gender and sexuality continua in Lucknow and India. My research focuses on what informs identity and how identity is formed in interaction. I use ethnography and the communities of practice framework (Eckert and McConnell Ginet 1992) to study the janana community of practice. My goal in this paper is to explore how as researchers and sociolinguists we find nuances in the gender and sexuality continua and language use in cultures that we do not know well, or in cultures to which we belong, to comment on how language use becomes meaningful in communities. My work with jananas shows that gender and sexuality are reliant on class associations and vary with respect to how much a janana feels obligated to their family. This chapter answer questions about identifying cultures in communities, finding identity in interaction, and how to make local meaning speak to global ideas about culture, gender, and language use.
