From Stigma to Shakti: The Politics of Indo-Guyanese Women’s Trance and the Transformative Potentials of Ecstatic Goddess Worship in New York City

Abstract

Indo-Caribbean Hindu goddess-centered worship is distinctly known for its ecstatic practices, yet women’s trance has become a major point of contention among temple communities in recent years. Emanating predominantly from within Indo-Guyanese/American ecstatic religious groups in New York City, such ambivalence and anxiety rest upon a paradoxical predicament: women routinely undergo trance despite a dominant discourse that women should not. Through a feminist critique, I suggest gendered anti-trance narratives operate not merely as proscriptions, but they undergird multiple multivalent messages constitutive of emergent Indo-Guyanese diasporic subjectivities within the broader context of a transnational ecstatic religious movement. I argue that the dominant discourse itself, and ambiguity often characterizing women’s trance, are generative spaces—platforms for women’s self-assertions that in turn help to galvanize this religious movement by simultaneously reestablishing and reordering notions of tradition and authenticity.