Introduction

International Journal of Hindu Studies https://doi.org/10.1007/s11407-024-09359-4 ARTICLE: SPECIAL ISSUE ON REFIGURING BODIES THAT MATTER: SEX, GENDER, AND ALTERNATIVE BODILY IDENTITIES IN HINDU TRADITIONS Introduction Barbara A. Holdrege Accepted: 2 January 2024 © The Author(s) 2024 In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), and Undoing Gender (2004), Judith Butler explores the fraught terrain of sex, gender, sexuality, and embodiment and advances a performative theory of gender that challenges the heteronormative regimes of discursive power. The articles in this special journal issue refigure bodies that matter by engaging Butler and other feminist interlocutors in conversation with Indian perspectives on sex, gender, and alternative bodily identities derived from a range of traditions: Gaudı̄ya Vaisnava devotional discourse, Vaisnava bhakti poetry, ˙ ˙˙ ˙˙ Telugu dance performance traditions, and Tamil transgender communities.1 The contributors employ historical, textual, and ethnographic methods to explore these issues in diverse Indian communities across a range of registers, including different historical periods (medieval to contemporary), geographic regions (Uttar Pradesh, Bengal, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu), languages (Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, Maithili, Telugu, and Tamil), and social locations (Brahmanical and nonBrahmanical; high caste, low caste, and subaltern). All of the articles highlight the contributions of Butler’s theories while at the same time emphasizing the limitations of their feminist interventions, which are not adequate to account for the religious dimensions of bodies that matter in particular Indian communities in various historical, cultural, and religious contexts. This special journal issue is intended as a 1 See Armour and St. Ville (2006) for an earlier collection of essays in which scholars of religion critically assess the implications of Butler’s theories for a variety of issues in biblical, Christian, Islamic, and Buddhist traditions. & Barbara A. Holdrege Department of Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California 93106, USA 123 Barbara A. Holdrege gesture towards “theory parity”2 by providing hermeneutical space to the alternative imaginaries proposed by Indian interlocutors whose theorizing might inspire us to re-vision our own theoretical formulations. Bodies beyond Matter and Gender beyond Sex in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Discourse In “Sex, Gender, and Devotional Desire: Refiguring Bodily Identities in Gaudı̄ya ˙ Vaisnava Discourse,” I bring contemporary feminist theorizations of the body, and ˙˙ more specifically of the relationship between sex and gender, into conversation with the distinctive ontological theories of bodily identities espoused by sixteenthcentury Gaudı̄ya Vaisnava authorities, who, in formulating their bhakti-śāstra, ˙ ˙˙ formal discourse of bhakti, frame the categories of sex and gender in relation to a third term, devotional desire. I focus in particular on ongoing feminist debates about the relationship between the sexed body and the gendered body in which the validity of the distinction between sex (male or female) and gender (feminine or masculine) is itself a topic of contention. On the one hand, feminist proponents of social constructionism propose a base/superstructure model in which the sexed biological body is essentialized as the “natural” base on which gender is superimposed as a second-order ideological construction. On the other hand, feminist advocates of sexual difference seek to dismantle the distinction between sex as an essentialist category and gender as a constructionist category and insist that sex, like gender, is a sociocultural construction bound up in the regulatory regimes of signification and power. I highlight the contributions of the theory of écriture féminine propounded by Luce Irigaray (1985a, 1985b, 1993) and Hélène Cixous (1976, 1994; Cixous and Clément 1986) and the theory of gender performativity epoused by Judith Butler (1990, 1993, 2004), whose feminist interventions have pointed to the liberatory potential of “writing the body” (Irigaray and Cixous), “rematerializing sex,” and “undoing gender” (Butler) in order to generate new bodily inscriptions freed from phallocentric discursive practices and heteronormative regimes. At the same time, I emphasize the limitations of these feminist interventions, which remain bound to what Michael Radich (2016) has characterized as “the materialist understanding of body” in which the ordinary human body composed of flesh and blood persists as the default template. Such feminist theorizations are not adequate to account for the radically different models of extraordinary embodiment found in premodern religious traditions such as the Gaudı̄ya Vaisnava tradition. The Gaudı̄ya discourse ˙ ˙˙ ˙ of embodiment emphasizes distinctions between “body” and “matter” and between “sex” and “gender” on both the human and divine planes and challenges prevailing body theories by positing bodies beyond matter and gender beyond sex. In the first phase of my analysis, I focus on the Gaudı̄ya discourse of divine ˙ embodiment, which celebrates the paradigmatic divine body beyond matter: the absolute body of Krsna, svayaṃ Bhagavān, who exists eternally in his transcendent ˙˙ ˙ 2 The expression “theory parity” derives from Cabezón (2006: 31). 123 Introduction to the Special Issue on Sex, Gender, and Alternative Bodily Identities in Hindu Traditions abode, the transcendent Vraja-dhāman, beyond the material realm of prakṛti and even beyond the impersonal, formless Brahman. In Gaudı̄ya formulations the ˙ vigraha, absolute body, of Bhagavān is nonmaterial and eternal and, like his svarūpa, essential nature, consists of being (sat), consciousness (cit), and bliss (ānanda). At the level of the sat-cit-ānanda-vigraha there is no distinction between the body and the possessor of the body, and the distinction between sex and gender also disappears, for gender alone exists beyond the material realm. The integrated personal-cum-bodily identity of Krsna is gendered as male/masculine, as reflected in ˙˙ ˙ his svarūpa, essential nature, and svayaṃ-rūpa, essential form, in which, although beyond materiality, he appears in a human-like shape (narākāra), and more specifically in the form of a gopa, cowherd boy. The transcendent abode of Krsna is ˙˙ ˙ represented as a gendered world of eternal relationships in which he revels perpetually in an unmanifest līlā, divine play, with his eternally perfect associates— the gopīs and gopas of the transcendent Vraja—who possess nonmaterial bodies, participate in Krsna’s essential nature, and relish their all-consuming love for him in ˙˙ ˙ distinct rasas, flavors of devotion, that are intrinsic to their eternally gendered devotional subjectivities. In the second phase of my analysis, I (...truncated)