ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how gender can be reconceptualized using the generative capacity of the Sikh spirito-conceptual knowledge system. The chapter begins by exploring the standard practice of understanding gender and religion as identities that are fixated to the cultural and ideological dictates of secular society. It then explores how Sikh conceptual frameworks open the categories to allow for a more transitive movement of bodies and affect that can break our moral grip over objective knowledge and construction of what constitutes as “proper” Sikh gendered and sexual identity. The latter half of the paper explores the importance of recognizing Sikh philosophical discourse as part of Sikh lived experience, both in the contemporary and historic times that can begin to reveal the connections Sikh and queer subjectivities have with one another and the world at large through the gurmat practice of ego-loss.
