Disrupting and Disruptive Bodies

This paper explores how the body bereft and body credit work in India's Traditional Dalit Religious Knowledge (TDRK)systems. Conceptualizing body bereft as the social condition of the negative symbolic value of body representations in the casteist society. Dalits are body bereft. By body credit, it is meant the creative reclaiming of symbolic value and agency of the subaltern by discrediting the hegemonic imprints through ritual performativity. To illustrate the body bereft and body credit in the TDRKs,  the paper focuses on two TDRKs in South India, Pottan Theyyam and Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha(PRDS).

The relationship between identity, self-actualization, and religion can be a tumultuous one depending on how closely someone’s body aligns with the expectations of society or their faith. Is there a way to decenter normative constructions of identity so people can live a life being more authentic to themselves and others? Using a qualitative approach to bring together feminist and religious scholars with grassroots queer discourses, the ways people think about gender for oneself and for others can be reimagined to embrace the inherent fluidity of human identities in challenging ways to hegemonic expectations. This antireal gender ontology not only changes individual embodiments in liberative ways by repositioning the body as its own unclassifiable form but can affect religious studies by refocusing how certain gendered doctrines, theologies, and interpretations of sacred texts are understood, hopefully in ways which reduce harmful power dynamics in academia and subvert religious expectations for identity.

Feminist philosopher, Elizabeth Grosz, engagingly probes the various ways in which feminist theory holds the potential to generate concepts that “enable us to surround ourselves with the possibilities for being otherwise” (2012:13-14).[1] The Anthropocene, although a troubling concept in itself – locating humans at the center of being and belonging – denotes our current time of anthropogenic ecological disruption. The Anthropocene requires us to engage critically, think imaginatively and creatively about the study of religion. This paper uses insights from Anthropocene feminism to think creatively about bodies and religion. It explores through empirical material, the various ways in which the bodies we study, embody and perform can hold ‘possibilities for being otherwise’.

[1] Grosz , E. ( 2012 ), “The Future of Feminist Theory: Dreams for New Knowledges”, in H. Gunkel , C. Nigianni, and F. Soderback (eds), Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice, 13–22, New York: Palgrave, Macmillan.