The closet, encounters and lived religion : reflections on the experiences of LGBT and British Muslims

Abstract

This thesis addresses the paucity of research at the intersections of geographies of religion, ethnicity and sexuality by exploring the lived experiences of LGBT+ British Muslims. Discourses concerning British Muslim sexualities all too often frame British Muslims as antithetical to the celebration and progression of sexual minorities, while rarely providing the space for them to share their own accounts and practices. Drawing on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 19 LGBT+ British Muslims, I use an intersectional approach informed by black and postcolonial feminism to analyse how they experience and negotiate what are often framed and judged as oppositional minority religious, ethnic and sexual identities and communities. I contend that LGBT+ British Muslims understand and respond to the conflicts and relations of power across different spatial contexts and their scalar relationships in ways that are meaningful to them without subscribing to linear, teleological constructions. I highlight the discursive, spatial and embodied contexts that regulate their sexualities and develop understandings of closet geographies by attending to the multi-scalar, intersectional and intergenerational relations of LGBT+ British Muslim experiences that disrupt binary and individualised notions of the closet. By paying attention to how power operates across different domains and social and political contexts, I show how urban encounters make difference, aggregate temporalities and condition senses of belonging and their assertions. Further, I problematise secularist representations of LGBT+ identities and institutionalised and cultural logics of religious homophobia by analysing how LGBT+ British Muslims maintain affiliation with Islam through everyday practices of faith that may not be theologically ordained but nevertheless develop capacities for developing religious agency and affirmation of their different identities. By highlighting experiences of LGBT+ British Muslims, I address their extant absence within geographic research and demonstrate their negotiations of different everyday contexts that contour exclusion.