DESI EROS: Reclaiming South Asian Erotic Power Through Arts-Based Phenomenology and Hindu Epistemology

DESI EROS is an arts-based phenomenological research project with a decolonial agenda that sought to answer the question: How is erotic power experienced in the contemporary lives of diasporic Desi (South Asian) women, in light of our cultural contexts and colonial histories? Phenomenological descriptions were collected from six participants about their lived experiences of reclaiming erotic power as Desi women. Each participant's description was interpreted for essential meanings via hermeneutic data interpretation. These essential meanings were then expressed artistically as acrylic paintings as a visual interpretation of what reclaiming erotic power means for each participant. The phenomenological paintings include ancient folk symbolism that reveals essential meanings of South Asian erotic power in our indigenous cultures-in the beliefs and practices of our precolonial South Asian traditions, faiths, and ancestors. The arts-based phenomenological research findings are published at https://www.desieros.com for public dissemination; each painting is accompanied by an essay about indigenous meanings of South Asian erotic power, as revealed by the arts-based phenomenological research process. Key to this research study's decolonial efforts is not only a reclamation of indigenous South Asian sexualities but also of indigenous Hindu epistemologies. This article describes the researcher's decolonial-transpersonal method of doing arts-based phenomenological research, by which she entered a meditative state of consciousness while painting akin to the receptive state of the Indian yogi, through which divine revelations were received intuitively about essential meanings of the phenomenon of South Asian erotic power. Accordingly, this article positions arts-based phenomenological research as a transpersonal method of inquiry by comparing Western phenomenological research methods to Eastern (Hindu) spiritual practices of knowledge acquisition. In doing so, it reflects on notions of epistemic justice and knowledge democracy amidst Qualitative Psychology's movement toward decolonization.