Sikh Formations

Religion, Culture, Theory

ISSN: 1744-8727 (Print) 1744-8735 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsfo20

Sikh diasporic feminisms: Provocation 1

Anneeth Kaur Hundle

To cite this article: Anneeth Kaur Hundle (2017) Sikh diasporic feminisms: Provocation 1, Sikh
Formations, 13:4, 237-240, DOI: 10.1080/17448727.2017.1419679

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17448727.2017.1419679

Published online: 27 Dec 2017.

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SIKH FORMATIONS, 2017
VOL. 13, NO. 4, 237–240
https://doi.org/10.1080/17448727.2017.1419679

ESSAY

Sikh diasporic feminisms: Provocation 1

Anneeth Kaur Hundle
University of California, Merced, CA, USA

On 14th May 2017, Nirinjan Kaur Khalsa and myself helped to organize a small group of
US and UK-based Sikh intellectuals and scholars to meet at Loyola Marymount University
in Los Angeles to discuss the problem and project of Sikh diasporic feminisms. We were
interested in thinking through the possibilities and limitations of this political and intel-
lectual project in relation to the politics of knowledge production in the university and in
academia, the broader public spheres within which we engage, and in the context of our
own communities.
Indeed, despite the ground-breaking work of an earlier generational cohort of feminist-
oriented Sikh scholars who have developed original and innovative analyses of gender and
sexuality studies in relation to Punjabi Sikhs in both Punjab and its diaspora communities
(Axel 2001; Das 2006; Grewal 2005; Jakobsh 2010, 2003; Mahmood and Brady 2000) and
in relation to Sikhi and Gurbani (Singh 2005, 2008), we find it necessary to continue to
create space for ongoing conversations about the intersections of feminism and Sikhism
in our current historical moment and political crossroads. While there have been intermit-
tent events and initiatives in Sikh Studies which have compelled critical conversations on
Sikh feminisms and Sikh feminist politics, including a workshop on gender and Sikh
Studies at Yale University and series of conferences organized around themes of Sikhi,
gender inequality, and feminism sponsored by the Canadian organization Sikh Feminist
Research Institute (SAFAR) in 2011, 2012, and 2014, we hope to continue to develop
research agendas in this field as a younger cohort of feminist-oriented scholars interested
in Sikh Studies join the academy. We believe that the project that we name, ‘Sikh Diasporic
Feminisms’ has the ability to cross-cut scholarly interventions in academia, engage with
multiple transnational public spheres, and speak to the general community and Sikh
youth’s interests in questions of patriarchy; feminism; and gender and sexuality issues.
Most recently, this general interest in issues of feminism and gender and sexuality equality
among Sikh youth can be exemplified by numerous new websites and blogs devoted to
transgressive and transformative writing about social issues impacting local Sikh
communities.
More specifically, our interest in organizing the initial Sikh diasporic feminisms work-
shop was intimately tied to a moment of political urgency. By invoking feminism, we are
first of all interested in articulating an onto-epistemological, political and intellectual
project that is concerned with systems of patriarchy and power. Indeed, we reaffirm
this commitment in the context of the far right current national political climate that
has normalized and naturalized neo-fascist, neoliberal capitalist, nativist, and hetero-patri-
archal objectives in relation the avowedly liberal multiculturalist polices of the American

CONTACT Anneeth Kaur Hundle akaurhundle@ucmerced.edu

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
238 ESSAY

state and university. Interestingly, these old and new configurations of hetero-patriarchal
power have also produced new terrains of resistance, most recently exemplified by the his-
toric women’s march that coincided with the inauguration of Donald Trump as president
in January 2017, the outing of powerful sexual predators in business and in Congress in the
American public sphere, by the #MeToo social media campaign, and by the recent debate
within South Asian academia and among multi-generational South Asian feminists
regarding the politics of social media ‘shaming’ and ‘call out culture’ of sexual harassers
in the academy.
Amidst all of these complex currents, we reaffirm the need to articulate, identify, and
politically stake terrains for Sikh diasporic feminist projects and for the broader interrog-
ation of Sikh feminisms in relation to Indian/South Asian feminisms (including Third
World and postcolonial traditions of feminist thought), woman of color (intersectional
feminism) and transnational feminist projects. Here, ‘feminism’ is not invoked as a
Western tradition, but as a product of the encounter between Western feminist intellectual
traditions and Sikh gender, labor and kinship systems, ideas about gender equality, and
resistance to hetero-normative patriarchies. We also argue that Sikh feminist thought
and practice is not a unitary tradition, but multiple and complex – therefore we invoke
Sikh feminisms in the plural. Within existing streams of feminist thought and practice
(postcolonial, intersectional, and transnational), we highlight our identities, positionalities
and agencies as Sikh women articulating feminist ideas and practice in the diasporic
context.
In the South Asian context in particular, we lay space and claim for Sikh feminisms due
to our minority status and historical experience in the context of British imperialism, colo-
nialism, modern nation-state building, and experiences of violent exclusion in the context
of the 1984 Punjab crisis. We are interested in the possibilities of feminism because of the
ways in which Sikh diasporic women and queer Sikhs must negotiate numerous hetero-
patriarchal nationalist projects and state violences (including sources emanating from
the Indian state, from separatist Sikh movements in Punjab and the diaspora, from Amer-
ican nationalisms and American empire), as well as forms of communal and domestic
patriarchies. We also recognize the need to understand individual and collective identity
formation, our subjectivities, and our agency in the context of postcolonial, secular liberal,
and neoliberal capitalist structures of violence and the ways in which these various patri-
archies (domestic, communal, societal and state-based) are expressed and mediated
through structures of race, caste and class. As feminist scholars, we thus struggle with mul-
tiple forms of patriarchal violence – structural, symbolic, bodily, and psychological – as we
seek to make the world anew.
Significantly, we are also interested in the ways in which the gender/sexuality distinc-
tion and gender binary have both been interrogated by the post-structural and post-
secular liberal turn in feminist criticism – thus, the feminist terrain we seek to highlight
in our project of articulating Sikh diasporic feminisms encourages productive and eman-
cipatory imaginaries of gender and sexuality expression that contend with modern patri-
archies and intersect with Sikhi and Sikh thought more generally. Indeed, are there ways in
which Sikh concepts, ideas and practices can be mined and sourced for their potential to
create new kinds of universals (and not only alternatives) in relation to postcolonial, inter-
sectional, and transnational feminist thought? While local context and particulars always
matter in our construction and practice of multiple life-worlds, can Sikh experience offer
 SIKH FORMATIONS 239

something in the way of larger universal interventions? And if so, how? Thus, the project
that we envision spans onto-epistemological, intellectual, political, and ethical concerns
among Sikh feminist scholars. We are concerned with questions like, ‘what does Sikh fem-
inist knowledge look like?’ And, following Freire and Donaldo (2000) notion of praxis as
‘reflection and action oriented towards the structures to be transformed,’ we also ask, ‘what
informs Sikh feminist praxis?’
The LA workshop in May was intended to be, first and foremost, a ‘space-clearing’
gesture that could establish room for alternative imaginaries and reconstructions for a
world within which we believe Sikh feminists can not only survive, but flourish. We felt
that this act was humanizing, life-affirming and powerful in its very nature. In a small
seminar room, we sought to begin pursuing four major goals that might be part of a col-
lective Sikh diasporic feminist project. First, we seek to map out the terrain of hetero-patri-
archies that Sikh feminist scholars and intellectuals, of varying gender and sexuality
affiliations, must contend with in their homes, communities, universities, and intellectual
life. For example, mining and interrogating our own archives of life experience and auto-
biographies, we explored the ways in which it is still difficult to name, identify, and recog-
nize systems and structures of patriarchy in Sikh sangat and in everyday Sikh domestic
and communal life. We also shared our experiences of finding it difficult to articulate
ongoing feminist claims in the context of the formal gender equality articulated in
Gurbani and by the Sikh panth. We discussed shared experiences that exemplified the
foreclosing of critical thought and practice in our communities, experiences that often
strategically worked to reproduce hegemonic heteropatriarchies and reinforce gender
inequality in Sikh institutions. We also discussed the ways in which these experiences
were entwined with broader heteropatriarchal systems in the diasporic context. Our
second major goal is to define the historical and current terrain of Sikh feminist and/or
gender and sexuality scholarship to further understand and clarify the paths that have
already been taken in Sikh intellectual traditions, including their possibilities and limit-
ations. Here, we worked from a list of core themes on gender studies scholarship in
Punjab and the diaspora that I have compiled for a talk at LMU in January 2017.1
Our third and fourth goals of a Sikh diasporic feminisms project, like the previous two
goals, are still ongoing. We wish to continue exploring, discussing, and imagining what
Sikh feminist knowledge, praxis, ethics, and intellectual life might look like. In particular,
how can emergent and ongoing, complex, and multiply-located Sikh feminisms help us to
understand ourselves, our political and ethical engagements in the local communities and
broader publics within which we belong, and our agency and resistance within existing
structures of violence? How might this knowledge help to inform emancipatory practices
and imaginaries moving forward?
Our final goal is to establish research agendas in relation to the project of Sikh diasporic
feminisms. Here, we ask, what are our goals for this vision and project? How will we con-
tinue this conversation in the face of the many obstacles that we must overcome to create
space for it? Indeed, these obstacles include the minority status of Sikh issues in South
Asia/diaspora studies, gender studies and the broader academy, Sikh women’s unequal
access to higher education and critical thought, the extraction of Sikh women’s reproduc-
tive and productive labor in the family, community, nation, and the university, the politics
of research and knowledge production in the American and British university systems
which limit the ability of Sikh women and queers to produce knowledge about themselves
240 ESSAY

and their experiences, and the broader ways in which we must survive the brute forces of
heteropatriarchal hegemonies in society at large. Must a Sikh diasporic feminisms project,
then, necessarily be a coordinated and collective endeavor born out of feminist solidarity
with allies and comrades? How will we mobilize resources, time, and energy for this
project – and under what conditions in the Trump era?
Our workshop at LMU ended with an energizing, healing, and uplifting walk on the
sands of the Play Del Ray beach in Los Angeles. We breathed deeply as we walked, in
and out, synchronizing breath to the rhythm of the waves, in and out, naam simran on
my mind and tongue. As the sunrays danced in a million directions on the breaking
waves on the shoreline, I thought about the polycentric, multi-directional, boundless
and cacophonous energy of the worlds we have yet to make universal and possible; the
oceanic palimpsest of ephemera--traces and roots of community, human relations, soli-
darity, and sovereignty still to be reconstructed. In the responses that follow, I invite
my colleagues at the workshop to reflect, build, extend and critique on my synthesis
and provocations of a Sikh diasporic feminisms project.

Note
1. ‘Feminism and Sikhi: the State of the Field.’ Invited lecture at ‘Spiritual Warriors: (Non)Vio-
lence in the Sikh and Jain Traditions, Loyola Marymount College.’ 24th February 2017.

References
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Freire, Paolo, and Macedo Donaldo. 2000. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th Anniversary Edition.
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