“Who is more intersectional than me?” An ethnography of the social locations of LGBTQ people from a Muslim background in Brussels, Belgium

Abstract

In this thesis, I apply an intersectional approach to the lives of LGBTQ people from a Muslim background living in Brussels. I pay attention to the multiple interlocking axes of racialisation and sexualisation that intervene in shaping processes of identification for LGBTQ people from a Muslim background, the oppression they encounter, and the sites of potential disruption of binarised norms that they inhabit. I present an analysis of ethnographic data collected in Brussels between August 2017 and August 2018. Methods of data collection included participant observation in spaces connected to the LGBTQ Muslim scene of the city, 30 semi-structured interviews with LGBTQ people from a Muslim background living in Brussels, and a weekend of participatory theatre activities with nine LGBTQ people from a Muslim background. The research was conducted in collaboration with Merhaba, an organisation working with and for LGBTQ people from a migratory background in Belgium. This thesis illuminates the specific social location occupied by LGBTQ people from a Muslim background, beyond mainstream discourses that heavily rely on tropes of civilisational clash between the West and the Arab/Muslim East on lines of attitudes towards sexual diversity and gender equality. I argue that such an illumination not only allows for a better understanding of the lived experiences of LGBTQ people from a Muslim background, but it also produces a radical disruption of essentialising discourses of difference, and their materialisations at the scale of the city. By focussing on the experiences and narratives of LGBTQ people from a Muslim background, and the disruption that their social locations entail, this thesis contributes to postcolonial approaches to the study of sexualities, to conceptualisations of intersectionality and its applications in the European context, and to the study of geographies of sexualities and geographies of race and ethnicity.