This article explores how queerness and religion intersect in a unique enactment of Bathukamma, a flower festival honoring the female divine in Hyderabad, the capital of the South Indian state of Telangana. Drawing on theories of figuration, I analyze how local queer organizations celebrate the festival in a way that engages two distinctive modes of belonging: one connected to “The Hijra”, a historically embedded figure of nonnormative gender rooted in religious traditions of renunciation, and another shaped by the broader cultural politics around Bathukamma itself, which draws on ideas of regional identity and locality ( sthānikata ) as an alternative to Hindu nationalism. I introduce the concept of configuration to describe how queer presence and modes of belonging can emerge from situational and relative arrangements of cultural symbols and practices that contest prevailing norms of gender and sexuality while remaining anchored in their local histories. This perspective shifts queer anthropology's engagement with religious lifeworlds from imagining them as “ queer elsewheres ” to centering contingent and precarious modes of being present—queerly—in a concrete “ here and now ”.
Stefan Binder (Fri,) studied this question.