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Conclusion

We would like to suggest that the kind of gendered negotiations discussed in this chapter, while particularly overt in the Hindi-speaking hijra community, are not uniąue to alternative gender identities; rather, women and men of many communities manipu-late linguistic expectations of femininity and masculinity in order to establish varying positions of solidarity and power. That speak-ing styles recognized culturally as ‘women’s speech’ or ‘men’s speech’ are not determined by the sex of the speaker, but rather constructed collaboratively in social interaction, is a point madę salient by linguists working at the intersection of linguistics and queer theory: Barrett (1994, 1996) in his exposition of discursive style-shifting among a community of African American drag ąueens; Gaudio (1996) in his discussions of the appropriation of feminine speech styles by Hausa-speaking *yan daudu; Ogawa and Smith (1996) in their work on appropriations of Japanese ‘women’s language’ by gay men in Tokyo and Osaka; and Livia (1995,1996) in her articles on the varying uses madę of the French linguistic gender system by male-to-female transsexuals, hermaph-rodites and gay drag ąueens. In the interactions described in these articles (which report on four very different linguistic communities on four separate continents), the speech ideologically associated with masculinity and femininity, and indeed sometimes the linguistic gender system itself, is used to express much morę than mere gender differentiation. Linguistic gender, in its close association with one of the most basie divisions in social organization, is used as a tool for evoking a wide rangę of societal discourses on power and solidarity, difference and dominance.

Moreover, the structure of linguistic evocations is not arbitrary, but influenced by societal ideologies of femininity and masculinity. Although Banaras hijras challenge such ideologies in their conflict-ing employments of masculine and feminine speech, often subverting the gender system in innovative and unexpected ways,