Queer Indigeneity and Heritage-Making in Nepal

This collaborative project is aimed at exploring what it means to be queer and Indigenous in Nepal, foregrounding Indigenous and ‘lower caste’ voices so far marginalised from mainstream queer and Indigenous organising and theorising. The project does this through creative workshops exploring how Indigeneity and queerness might shape the identities, lives and performative practices of four different types of transfeminine dance groups in the eastern Terai. The project explores how queerness and Indigeneity are simultaneously negotiated and enacted by cultural performers across generations in different spaces in semi-urban Nepal, highlighting how these practices subvert or entrench dominant cultural knowledge and heritage-making practices of marginalised groups.

This project is carried out in collaboration with two LGBTI+ NGOs - Human Welfare Society in Itahari and Parivarthanshil Samaj in Biratnagar; Kala-Kulo, a Nepali collective mostly comprising Indigenous artists; and Kailash Rai as one of the founding members of Indigenous Without Borders, a research and advocacy organisation working on Indigenous rights in the country. The project is funded by an Outreach Fund under of the project, Heritage as Place-making: The Politics of Solidarity and Erasure in South Asia.