Deriving its theoretical concerns from the disciplinary intersection of Religious Studies, Queer Studies, and Area Studies, this panel encompasses papers that mobilize methodological approaches ranging from ethnographic fieldwork to textual analysis, to raise and map out the varied dimensions of queerness in various religious traditions spanning across the geographical areas of Nepal, Srilanka, South India, and Thailand. Adopting varied methodological pursuits and theorizing on both pre-modern and modern conceptions of complexities of gender, sexuality, and body in South Asian religion, this panel is an invitation to scholars of South Asian Religions whose research spans varied geographical boundaries and methodologies in rethinking questions of queerness and lived religion.
This presentation combines original ethnographical interview material with a literature analysis of the works by Shyam Selvadurai, Hungry Ghosts (2013), and Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022). This will be expanded through research with queer people active in organizations such as Equal Grounds Sri Lanka and the Jaffna Queer Festival in Sri Lanka and from abroad. The focus will be on the experience and shifts of religiosity of queer agents and their ongoing relation to queer activism and religiosity in Sri Lanka. Further, I will use this analysis to explore the theoretical implications, possibilities, and limits of queer studies in religion, especially religions of South Asia. How does this influence the way we conceptualize religion? What do we deem as “folk religion”, how can a queered lens inform our understanding of multi-religiosity? How can queer theories enhance our understanding of religious identities?
Religion as a both marked and unmarked analytical category and axis of identity in South Asian queer lives and activism remains largely unexplored. This is symptomatic of the contested relationship between religious studies and Anglo-American-centric queer studies, as many queer theorists “regard religion as inimical to their purpose” (Wilcox 2020). In the South Asian context, both the “institutionalized presence of hijra” and the “spatio-intellectual hegemony of India” (Hossain 2018) have long dominated but also circumscribed discussions of nonnormative gender and sexuality. In this presentation, I employ a queer studies in religion framework to examine the role of religion in Nepali queer lives and activism through the examination of Nepal’s LGBTIQ+ NGO Blue Diamond Society and its engagement with two prominent Hindu festivals in Nepal—Gai Jatra and Teej—to explore the imbrication of religious, queer, and ethnic identity formations and practices in modern secular Nepal.
Drawing from an ongoing ethnographic inquiry that explores the Hindu dimensions of religious practice among members of Bangkok’s queer community I consider the ways in which two queer ritual specialists—Ajarn A and Ajarn I—amalgamate conventional Thai Buddhist beliefs with devotion towards the Indian Hindu gods Ganesha and Kali. This allows them to better serve clients who share their LGBTIQ+ identity. My analysis of the syncretic strategies that guide their engagement with these deities supplies an important case study for two growing bodies of scholarly literature: (1) the characterization of Thai religion as what cultural historian Peter Jackson has called a polyontological field comprised of distinct cosmological and ritual systems that maintain differentiated identities and (2) the construction of a queer religious identity premised on developing emotionally-affirming relationships with distant Hindu divinities in urban Bangkok
The male Āḻvārs (6th to 9th century CE), in their devotional poetry, adopt the voice of women and presume the possession of a female body, singing in love and longing to their beloved God Nārāyaṇa. These poems use tropes steeped in earlier Caṅkam Tamil literary tradition. In making a canonical corpus out of these poems, the śrīvaiṣṇava tradition composed elaborate commentaries that explain, contextualize, theorize, and theologize these voices. My presentation studies a portion of the commentary of the 13th-century theologian Periyavāccāṉ Piḷḷai, who presents a theological premise of a man singing to male God in love from a man’s body. I attempt to answer three primary questions; how does the śrīvaiṣṇava tradition complicate the relationship between the self, body, gender, and desire? Does it have its own theoretical lens to view the complexities of religious desire? How does this translate to lived experience in śrīvaiṣṇava lives today?