Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Fall 9-21-2016

Department

Social Justice and Community Engagement

Department

Social Justice and Community Engagement

Abstract

In a cultural climate characterized by increasing polarization and hostility towards difference, the lives and bodies of those standing at the intersection of religious and marginal sexual identities are actively shaped by and reshaping our social and cultural landscape. Cultural narratives that conflate religion with oppression and pit religion against ‘progressive’ political movements create artificial divisions that undermine the efforts of LGBTQI+ people of faith to effect change in their communities by pressuring them to compartmentalize—or closet— their spiritual or sexual selves. These constructions also reinforce discourses that claim there are no queer people in faith communities and no people of faith who are queer—effectively erasing LGBTQI+ people of faith from social consciousness. Despite the persistence of cultural narratives that dichotomize religion and sexual difference, some LGBTQI+ people of faith are refusing to remain closeted in their communities and their lives become embodied challenges to these polarizing narratives. This queer-poet community autoethnography, uses poetry to explore experiences of belonging and identity amongst the lived experiences of five LGBTQ Christians in their respective faith communities. These poems serve to highlight the subjugated knowledges of queer people of faith and explore their embodied disruptions of hegemonic discourses in queer studies and sociology of religion. The 30 participant-produced poems are presented in a zine format accompanied by a research paper where I contextualize the project in broader research and provide a thematic analysis of the poems and talking circle transcripts. This analysis shows that traditional conceptions of faith-development and identity formation fail to adequately represent the synergism of religious and sexual identity in lives of LGBTQ+ Christians.

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