Online Workshop, 28-30 May 2025
Trans/Religion in South Asia
This online workshop aims to expand our knowledge and understanding of what trans and religion might be and do in and across various South Asian contexts. Trans offers a mode of analysis that is not only concerned with gender identities but also explores the crossings and shifts that often characterize the contact between gender and religion and urges us to think with multiplicities, aggregated embodiments, affects, techniques, and limitless number of possible attachments (Aizura et al. 2020). We are particularly interested in the discursive and embodied enactments of gender in religious traditions and practices–and their many doings in religion, spirituality, kinship, gender, sexuality, class/caste, nationalism/s or beyond. We consider the ways in which religious practices have been central to affirming gender nonconforming identities and community worldmaking, as observed among hijras in Bangladesh (Hossain 2012 and 2018), hijras and/or kinnars in India (Nanda 1998; Reddy 2005; Bevilacqua 2022), khwaja siras in Pakistan (Jaffer 2017; Pamment 2019), and tirunankais and jogappas in South India (Craddock 2023 and 2024; Ramberg 2017). We are also interested in the ways in which transitory acts of gender form part of specific religious disciplines, as in the case of sakhis (van der Veer 1987), bauls (Lorea 2018), ‘cross-dressing’ Sufis (Anjum 2014; Ewing 1997, 1984, 2021), and religious festivals (Choudhary 2010; Kuriakose 2018; Flueckiger 2020). Recognizing how secular epistemologies have often worked to diminish our understanding of both trans and religion (Strassfeld 2019 and others), we invite a capacious consideration of imaginative ways of worlding gender by exploring understudied dimensions of religiosity, often rooted in local contexts. At the same time, we invite questions of how religious mythologies and practices can be mobilized for claiming the rights of gender non-conforming subjects (see Nagar, DasGupta 2023), sometimes reifying hegemonic constructs (Upadhyay, 2020), or moving “elsewhere” (Dutta 2022; Kasmani 2022).