International Review of Sociology

Decolonizing the Sacred: Queer and Trans Religious Lives in South Asia

This Special Issue explores how queer and trans people across South Asia engage with, reinterpret, and transform religious life through decolonial perspectives. It seeks to challenge colonial, heteronormative, and Brahmanical assumptions that have historically shaped scholarship on religion and gender by foregrounding lived religious experiences, indigenous epistemologies, and community knowledge.

We welcome interdisciplinary contributions that examine the intersections of sexuality, gender diversity, caste, religion, spirituality, ritual, and decolonial thought across historical and contemporary contexts.

Suggested topics include:

• Decolonial approaches to queer and trans religiosity in South Asia
• Indigenous understandings of gender diversity and the sacred
• Hijra, jogappa, aravani, khwaja sira, and other gender-diverse religious traditions
• Queer and trans interpretations of religious texts, myths, and iconographies
• Rituals, festivals, pilgrimage, devotion, and everyday religious practice
• Dalit-Bahujan queer religiosities and critiques of Brahmanical normativity
• Islamicate queer theologies, Sufi traditions, and Islamic devotional practices
• Queer and trans engagements with Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, Christian, and Indigenous religious traditions
• Sacred spaces, belonging, exclusion, and religious citizenship
• Spiritual kinship, gurus, healing, and alternative religious communities
• Religion, caste, sexuality, and intersectional identities
• Diasporic and transnational queer religious experiences
• Queer spiritualities in literature, film, visual culture, performance, and digital media
• Atheism, agnosticism, secularism, and post-religious queer subjectivities
• Comparative and cross-regional perspectives on queer and trans religiosity

This Special Issue welcomes empirical, theoretical, historical, ethnographic, textual, and interdisciplinary contributions from scholars, independent researchers, practitioners, activists, and community-based researchers.