Entangled Intimacies

Abstract This article traces the entanglements of kinship and religion by reflecting on diaspora Tamil women's lives in the global city of Singapore. It makes an intervention in the studies of diasporic religiosity by emphasizing the subjective and embodied experiences of devotion, sorcery, and divine possessions. The scholarship on Hinduism in Singapore has uncovered contestations and negotiations of plural identities in the multicultural city-state, amid ongoing shifts in urban landscapes and policy directives. The gendered dimensions of everyday religious practices and rituals foregrounded in this article shift the attention of extant scholarship on diaspora religion away from public spheres, migrant adaptation, and transnational networks to the ways that they intersect in intimate lives. The article situates the Tamil women's life stories, drawn from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2017–2019, by examining female selfhood, transgressive sacrality, and hidden religious topographies, and offers possibilities of theorizing urban religiosity through women's intimate and embodied experiences.