Mughal India had a long history of mistress–maid homoeroticism, ambiguously gendered domestic laborers, and slave–servant–concubine continuum. European men in India initially mimicked Mughal elites and maintained harems with Indian bibis (concubines). British colonialism in India, however, led to the domestic transition from bibis to memsahibs (white women). Chapter 1 situates the creation of a new desexualized colonial caregiver, the ayah, in the growing British shame about interracial sex, concubinage, domestic slavery, and mixed-race children from the 1780s. The ayah, Chapter 1 argues, distinguished the respectable, racially pure British imperial home from hypersexualized Mughal households and from mixed-race slave-holding European Catholic households. The brown ayah was crucial for the production and reproduction of British imperial whiteness at a time of heightened racial and sexual anxiety. The desexualized racialized ayah thus erased the embarrassing prevalence of sexual and reproductive labors provided by South Asian women to British men. The final section of this chapter explores the lived experiences of colonial ayahs as they upheld the racial and sexual hierarchies of the British Empire.

The chapter demonstrates the expressive and evaluative potential of grammatical gender and specifically highlights the ways ‘grammatical neutering’ can be used to belittle and other unpopular politicians. The authors develop the idea that in gendered languages intentional deviations from a grammatical norm are pragmatically loaded and express a notable implicit message. They present a number of examples collected from online Ukrainian-language sources where the neuter pronoun vono (it) was used to refer to two presidents: Putin, the president of the Russian Federation, and Zelensky, the president of Ukraine. Viewing such examples as cases of grammatical metaphor, the authors show that classifying a referent as ‘other’ may be achieved not only by lexical but also by grammatical means. The application of it and neuter morphology where feminine or masculine is expected while expressing disapproval produces a strong pragmatic effect. The addition of grammatical dehumanization and desexualization to derogatory semantic propositions magnifies the utterances’ negative impact and helps to communicate antipathy and dissociation. The chapter discusses the communicative consequences of grammatical metaphorization of the neuter third person pronoun in Ukrainian political discourse, drawing conclusions about pragmatic effects of grammatical gender alternations.